Apparently the hot patch of adding in surveillance features didn't go as smoothly as hoped :-) I jest of course given the press recently about how good iMessage is at preventing eavesdropping. Keeping services like this alive is pain. Just the other night I got to experience being "down" when as far as my routers were concerned I was "up", some maintenance snafu upstream had my traffic stuck in a routing loop. But no BGP failover because as far as my router was concerned it could talk to its peer. Sigh.
Alternatively, one can imagine a DoS against iMessage (potentially something as subtle as getting a routing table screwed up for some target ISP) with the goal of causing a critical conversation you wish to intercept to be relegated to SMS.
It's rather frustrating when the core functionality for a quarter billion phones stops working on a monthly basis. But at least I can now understand the hot tears generated when BBM would go down; over-the-top messaging with delivery/read/syndication truly is superior to SMS.
I pretty much need to "try again" when sending any message, sometimes it sends without any issues, but most of the times just shows me the exclamation red icon, and I need to try again.. And then sometimes it goes, others it fails again.. And this can go on for 2 or 3 more tries. It actually worked better when it was launched than now.
Just re-discovered if your outgoing iMessage is hanging, you can tap-and-hold on the blue bubble, and then choose "Send as text message". Beats waiting for the service to time out...
I never really used iMessage. It never made any sense when I had been using AIM since 2002; why not continue?
I like the ability to contact phone numbers rather than user IDs, but apart from that, one AIM account on all devices seems to be a better proposition, at least in my experience.
On iPhones, you don't explicitly use iMessage, it just switches to iMessage automatically when sending an SMS message to a recipient also uses iMessage. That is the primary reason to use it, though it is handy to be able to send messages on the network via other Apple devices as well.
I had to turn iMessage off on my iPhone since it was extremely flaky for me and an acquaintance: messages would not be delivered or much later. WhatsApp is better but SMS has been the most reliable so far.
iMessage is great for communicating with less-technical people who I'm never going to convince to use something like AIM. And once I'm using it for them, might as well use it for everybody, at least within the Apple universe.