[tshirthoodie]

Apple's iMessage implementation loses messages all the time. It happens about once every month between my girlfriend and I.

I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intended recipient. They are both retired and always together so they haven't reached the point of getting a new plan.

[rgbrenner]

iMessage is routed through apple's servers over TCP. So this is like saying: sometimes I go to google.com but it randomly loads bing.com... must be related to my group carrier plan

What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.

[just2043]

Yeah sounds more like the aunt and uncle once shared an Apple ID and then moved to seperate ones later.

[mortenjorck]

This is by far the most plausible explanation. iMessage’s biggest surface area for problems is multiple/migrated associated emails.

[tshirthoodie]

Interesting. Do you know how they could fix it? I will send them this thread. They will love it.

[tshirthoodie]

Yeah, who knows? I am only brainstorming. Ever since I discovered the abysmal state of Apple's customer service after having my iphone stolen last year, I feel confident we will never know.

[frumper]

I’m just curious what you think Apple should do for a stolen phone?

[tshirthoodie]

For a stolen phone with AppleCare+ insurance that has been paid for every month since purchasing the phone, they should at least offer a way to file a claim.

The only way to submit a claim was to click on a button in my icloud account that did not exist. I live in a big city and visited 3 Apple stores and spent about 15 hours in them in total, but none of them were able to help me get the claim filed so I had to give up. One of the supervisors did refund the ~$15/mo that I had paid for the AppleCare+ insurance, but I had to buy a new phone.

[ryanwaggoner]

AppleCare+ does not include theft coverage. For that you need to pay for "AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss", which I assume you didn't do: https://www.apple.com/support/products/iphone/

It's pretty easy to see why they wouldn't include theft + loss coverage unless you pay for it...

[rezonant]

I could believe losing messages. I cannot believe wrong recipient. One of these is a service reliability issue and the other is an insanely unlikely bug.

And what are the chances that the actual recipient ends up being the spouse of your expected recipient? Sounds more like they logged into each other's phones or something.

> suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan

Extremely doubtful it has anything to do with their plan. iMessage is over the top: only the first SMS activation message has anything to do with your carrier -- after that it's all sent through Apple's servers.

[wrboyce]

This has never, ever, happened to me and I have been using iMessage daily since its inception.

I call shenanigans.

[alexchantavy]

Adding my own datapoint: I’ve absolutely had this happen on iPhone to iPhone where the message appeared to be sent on one device but the other received nothing

[wrboyce]

If I was being asked to debug this for someone I know, my first two questions would be “did your phone say delivered?” and “does the recipient have a Mac/iPad/etc that could’ve received the message?”; do you know the answer to either of these?

I worry that sounds accusatory but that’s not my intention, I’m curious and too tired to attempt to reword it.

[JoblessWonder]

Not person you responded to… but isn’t it safe to assume that iMessages are delivered to all devices on the account?

[jacquesm]

So if something never ever happened to you it isn't true? That's a pretty self centered view of things.

[wrboyce]

I shouldn’t form an opinion based on my own experiences because it might upset you? That’s a pretty self centred view of things.

I could’ve expanded, I’m pretty much de facto “IT Support” for a lot of the friends/family I’ve spent those years communicating with using iMessage so I can pretty confidently say it has never happened to any of them either. I could go on to say that if it was a widespread issue this wouldn’t be the first we are hearing about it, and it absolutely would’ve been covered in some sort of tech news - possibly even the regular old news.

But sure, let’s go with self centred.

[kelnos]

That's not how experiences work. If someone says "I saw X" and you say "I didn't see X", that doesn't necessarily mean X doesn't exist, it just means you didn't see it. Sure, the person who saw X might have been hallucinating, but you don't have enough information to know either way.

It's a little weird to so strongly believe that a rare, intermittent bug (no one suggested it's "widespread") couldn't exist with a messaging service that gets a ton of traffic and has to support nearly a billion and a half people across the globe. May want to examine what biases lead you to having such a negative response to something like that.

Also consider that even if you have 1000 friends for whom you are "IT support guy", you've still interacted with fewer than 0.0001% of all iPhone users. You are several orders of magnitude off from a representative sample, especially if we're talking about a rare bug.

[danaris]

But tshirthoodie isn't just claiming "this extremely far-fetched things happened to me".

They're explicitly claiming "this happens all the time."

[jacquesm]

To his family.

[jacquesm]

You misread me: if something didn't happen to you that doesn't invalidate the GPs experience, it just means that your experiences differ. Now you have to figure out why they differ.

[makeitdouble]

https://www.coolmuster.com/ios-recovery/iphone-text-messages...

Doesn't feel like some rare issue. Googled it by curiosity, and there's a ton of "help" articles and support post on people randomly seeing messages disappear or not getting delivered.

[JoblessWonder]

Just a heads up, this article is SEO clickbait for a backup app and a lot of the others might be as well.

[danaris]

I use iMessage regularly, and have done so since it was first released.

I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).

I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.

In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.

[trws]

The most common case I know of for what looks like misdirection is having one contact with multiple iMessage phone numbers, especially if multiple contacts share one or more of them. Real world example, my wife and I each have both a work iPhone and a personal iPhone. If both are listed in a single contact, iOS will “helpfully” merge the iMessages from both on a sender’s device, but not on the receiver’s. It’s very difficult to tell which device you’re sending to in this case, and can be changed by the other party if they send you a message and you reply. If you didn’t know what was going on, that would look a whole lot like a message going to the wrong device or even recipient in some cases. As a result I literally have separate contacts for my wife to avoid the problem, the UX is otherwise really abysmal.

[the_mar]

Yeah, that’s how contacts work. What would you like to happen instead?

[angoragoats]

This is how iMessage works, not contacts, and as a user of the iPhone since its launch in 2007 this is surprisingly unexpected to me. I would expect each separate email/phone number to have its own conversation.

[the_mar]

this is also how regular messages work, no? If you save 2 numbers under the contact they would show up as the same conversation

[trws]

No, that’s only what happens in iMessage or iOS messages. In almost every other context you get one set per number or email, possibly with an option for a combined conversation. That’s really the issue, there’s no indicator in the conversation of which number or email you’re communicating with, or which you’re sending to, and no interface for separating or combining them. It happens non-deterministically at some point after adding multiple to the same contact, sometimes. That’s why I say the UX is poor, it’s unpredictable and uncontrollable even for someone that knows to look.

[kelnos]

I don't think anyone's claiming the GP's experience is universal. A quick search suggests that there are just under 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world. That's a lot of messages going back and forth. Anyone who's ever worked with distributed systems can tell you that the idea that a message never gets dropped is just hilarious and absurd.

I expect message loss is actually a pretty regular occurrence, in absolute numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of messages are dropped every year. But in the end that means that the delivery rate would be something like 99.99999999999%, which is actually pretty damn good (and it probably isn't that good; I'm just throwing around numbers here).

[blahgeek]

Are they sharing the same iCloud ID or something? That's the most likely scenario to me

[tshirthoodie]

My gen-z cousins have promised me that isn't the case.

[danielheath]

One obvious cause comes to mind: If your aunt and uncle use the same apple login for both phones, they'll often get each others imessages.

[omeze]

Youre being downvoted but I also lose a message every few months between my girlfriend and I. We both have relatively new iPhones and exclusively use iMessage so I do think its some rare protocol bug.

[tshirthoodie]

I'm surprised so many people claim they haven't experienced it and I wonder how many have and just don't know.

[omeze]

Ya I think most just would not notice between friends. But we’ve compared our iMessages and we aren’t doing anything weird like sharing apple IDs. Not a huge deal so it’s whatever, but if any Apple engineers read this: plz fix

[JoblessWonder]

Gotta check Settings -> Messages -> Send & Receive.

I would bet there is at least one overlap or misconfiguration there.