Why is imessaging so unbelievably unreliable???

I've had no problems with iMessages - it seems you have, but you haven't described your problem(s), thus we can't help.

I've had no issues or problems with iMessage.

If you have a question, by all means, fill us in on what's going wrong and what you've done to try and fix it so far.

Otherwise, stop spreading FUD.

I have absolute sympahty with the OP. iMessage is completely unreliable. Only today I sent an iMessage to a friend, it didn't zip through and the text message then failed to even show up in the list of SMS, gone forever, vanished without a trace!

MMS will not send outside of a solid Wifi or 3G signal. If I send a picture MMS on a non-3G or WiFi signal or I drop out of signal before it finishes it fails to send and will often completely stuff that message on the phone up until I do a hard reboot of the device.

Often messages show up as not delivered when they have been, and I've known of times where a message reported as delivered from a friend and I never got it (although I only know of that happening once, once was enough to not trust it though)

I've turned it off and won't be going back to it for a time, to some degree, with the amount of free SMS you get iMessage is a little pointless without mountain lion anyway ...

Luke

lukethegooner wrote:

MMS will not send outside of a solid Wifi or 3G signal. If I send a picture MMS on a non-3G or WiFi signal or I drop out of signal before it finishes it fails to send and will often completely stuff that

Well of course iMessage doesn't work if you don't have a 3G or WiFi connection. It requires data. It's working as designed.

Meg St._Clair wrote:

Well of course iMessage doesn't work if you don't have a 3G or WiFi connection. It requires data. It's working as designed.

Well this is mainly related to MMS - What I mean is that it's hugely unreliable on a GPRS connection, normal SMS messages work fine with a GPRS connection and will send MMS albeit slowly, iMessage craps out everytime with MMS and even simple text messages can be very very hit and miss on a GPRS. You would have thought they'd have the fundamentals of texting sorted out before launching the service.

If it's just a data service then fair enough, but I need something that works when the signal type and strength of the network (GPRS thru' 3G thru' WiFi) is fluctuating which would be normal when out and about with a 'mobile' device. iMessage doesn't seem able to deal with that very well.

By the way, the 'not delivered' and the 'delivered' that I never got has been consistent even on a 3G or WiFi network.

It's just unreliable; my text that vanished earlier happened on my home WiFi network which is upwards of a 15MB service. No excuses there.

Luke

I have to agree with Qwerty5, my wife bought a 4S and her iMessage didn't work from day 1. Eventually I managed to get it working but then she could only receive iMessages when she was on a wifi connection. Worse still, the people sending them had a successful delivery message on their device so wondered why she wasn't replying. She's eventually resorted to turning iMessage off. Then to top it all, iMessage has stopped working on my trusty old iPhone 4, so I've had to turn it off too. I think it's a poor show from Apple. iMessage has been around for a while, we shouldn't have to suffer such glitches on such expensive hardware.

iMessage has been flaky for me since the time it was introduced. Its behaviour becomes even more unpredictable when I enable more than one client, say my iPad and Mac, to access iMessage - messages would arrive but there would be no notification, nor any indication (message count on the icon) that a new message arrived, unless I actually opened the messages app to check.

iMessage appears only slightly less half-baked than the new and great maps. I've had to disable it completely on all my iToys.