[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.

[the_mar]

I am not trying to argue with you. The method of separating or combining emails/numbers to me lies within the contact. Because imessages can be sent from both emails and phone numbers (e.g. iphone as well as ipad without cellular connection) i’m not sure if there is a way to handle it while also accommodating your preference

[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).