[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).