Like a Kafkaesque nightmare for the Information Age, select former iPhone users who switch over to Google’s Android mobile operating system have been suffering an iMessage fiasco without a fix — keeping texts from arriving without notifying either party of the problem. Now, Apple has been slammed with a lawsuit over its negligence to address the issue, according to a report by Bloomberg on Friday.
The problem lies in iMessage, the service rolled out in 2011 with iOS 5 that lets iPhone users communicate with each over data and Wi-Fi instead of their respective telecom networks — meaning faster messages that don’t count toward your cell plan. Denoted only by a blue bubble around the text instead of a regular green one, iMessages were seen as a technical marvel for working seamlessly within the iPhone’s native SMS client.
That is until you decide to jump ship from iOS and head over to Android, an OS now running around 80 percent of smartphones worldwide as of May 2014.
Since the 2011 rollout of iMessage, select former iPhone owners with their cell number tied up in iMessage have reported an interference in which texts sent from existing iPhone owners fall into a void in which the sender thinks thinks it was delivered and the newly minted owner of the Android handset never receives it. The issue appears to be on a device level, meaning each and every current iPhone user’s device thinks the new Android user is still using an Apple handset.
Not only is that text then lost forever — wrapped up in the iMessage account of a deactivated iPhone — but Apple has no concrete solution to prevent it from happening, an Apple tech support specialist told Adam Pash, former Lifehacker editor in chief. Pash reignited the debate around the issue Tuesday in a blog post on his personal website alleging that Apple is aware of the problem, but “is apparently clueless as how to fix it,” the Apple tech support specialist told him.
Apple declined to comment for this story.
The “iMessage purgatory” ordeal, as Pash called it, may come to a head as newly minted Samsung handset owner Adrienne Moore filed a complaint yesterday in San Jose, Calif., claiming that Apple failed to disclose its knowledge of the problem and its lack of a viable solution.
Moore is seeking class action status for her suit — meaning she is suing on behalf of a larger group and the outcome could trickle down to all affected iPhone owners, though the complaint did not specify damages.
Current fixes for the problem include deactivating iMessage in the settings panel of your iPhone before switching over the SIM card or phone number to a new Android phone — though even that has proven ineffective for numerous affected iPhone owners. Other more cumbersome fixes involve having iPhone users in your address book delete your contact and re-add it, hopefully establishing a regular connection and wiping out the iMessage relationship between the two phone numbers.