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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting to me always is that my experience trying to send iMessages to people is usually the opposite: if someone's phone runs out of batteries or they start a phone call (on CDMA, which can't do voice and data simultaneously) I nearly instantly am forced to send them text messages. I also have found the "Delivered" notices very reliable: AFAIK they require a device to actually receive the message. Note however that it is "a device": if you have iMessage associated with another random device, it might be receiving your messages for you; I would be very interested in knowing if these people cataloged all devices they have from Apple (including Macs) and logged out of all of them. (It could, of course, just be a bug; but it at least doesn't seem to be some fundamental aspect of the design that it permanently hijacks messages.)

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My sister has an iPhone, but no data plan. So, if she's out and I want to text her from my iPhone, she needs to make sure she doesn't have iMessages running on her computer at home. If it's on, I text her a bunch of times and I just get the blue bubbles. Then I get a bunch of SMS messages from her saying "where are you? why aren't you texting me back" and hilarity ensues. I guess I could just call her.

My friend moved from an iPhone to an Android a while back and I couldn't message him anymore. I had to change the setting for his contact so that it would revert to standard SMS when imessage failed which seems to have worked fine, it's just a silly solution.

And it only solves it for you. The rest of his friends are probably still tossing imessages into a hole if they haven't caught on.

Ugh, I hear you. I had to disable iMessage on my girlfriend's iPad because it kept 'stealing' every SMS I tried to send her.

She could disassociate the phone number from her computer's iMessage account (Preferences -> Accounts). Then messages to her number would always go to her phone, and messages to the email account would go to the computer.

Thanks -- that's a good idea. I'll have to point that out to her.

The point is, why should you have to point that out? iOS 8 had better make it obvious -- "oh, I don't have data on my phone, so make sure it gets sent as an SMS too!"

But then you get into a whole heap of problems with multiple threads.

Or when the first message fails to go green just turn off data?

In my experience after a while the phone will say that it couldn't send the message and give you a little option to resend as SMS.

It would be nice to have that done automatically, but at least it's there sometimes.

If you know she's out (and therefore unlikely to have access to iMessage) you can force an SMS. Press and hold the blue bubble and you will get the option to 'Send as SMS message'.

I know that game... Trying to grab and hold an iMessage in the process of it sending, to reveal the "Send as a SMS message" button before the option disappears.

So you can't "send as SMS" in between the iMessage having been sent but before it's been delivered?

Its a bit confusing, but in my experience, as soon as the message finishes sending, whether its been delivered or just hit apples server, the send as SMS option will disappear.

Sometimes the message will say its failed to deliver and you get the option back.

You can double-tap it after sending to get the send-as-SMS option in a pop-up.

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