Why does iMessage randomly send as text instead?

We are having the same issue ...and i am sending the imessage to my father who is in India and now it becomes international texting randomly which is really messed up , I am almost paying atleast 10$ a month because of this bug

There is no bug, if imessage is unavailable, it will send it as a text as it should. If you go to my earlier post, i've shared to links that explains it and a troubleshooting link.

Is your dad in good 3G or wifi coverage in india?

So are you saying that it gets delivered to the receiver as a TEXT message if the receiver is not in a area with Wi-Fi or 3G coverage. In my opinion if the receiver is not reachable over wi-fi or 3G then the message should just not be delivered , it should not automatically convert this to a text message and deliver.

see link look under imessage http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3529

so shut off/block texts on your account. either imessage will go or it'll fail and you'll know it has failed. you can then resort to retrying or sending an email.

i have a question about imessage if someone know the answe of my question i'll be very thank full.

I have imessage and my friend also have imessage we both use imessage in home because we both have wifi connection so my question is that "if i send her imessage and she is not at home and she dont have data plan or internet connection in her cell phone then my imessage deliver her as a text message and she recive my message and a text(greenbubble) ?OR my message does not deliver her until she will not come home and use wifi?

Settings > Messages > Send as SMS

If this setting is ON then an iMessage will go out as SMS if you and/or the recipient has no internet connection (either Wi-Fi or 3G/LTE).

If this setting is OFF then an iMessage will fail if you and/or the recipient has no internet connection. Furthermore, if the sender has a connection but the receiver does not, the iMessage cannot get received once the recipient gets onto an internet connection. In other words, once an iMessage fails it cannot be received, you have to re-send it.

Does she have cell phone service? If she does it should deliver as an iMessage.

Marissa_97 wrote:

Does she have cell phone service? If she does it should deliver as an iMessage.

"Cell phone service" does not equate to "data service" ... you can be in an area where you can make calls and receive SMS, but no data (e.g. remote areas or interference). Under such conditions an iMessage will convert to SMS (if the option above is ON) or the iMessage will entirely fail (if the "Send as SMS" option is OFF).

I think this has drifted from the OT.

I was looking at this because exactly this has just happened to me with an iMessage, and I have SMS and MMS turned off.

The message failed - data in my office is flakey - and when hitting the exclamation point I got a dialog box asking for "try again", "send as SMS", and "cancel." I hit "try again" - I am quite positive - and the message sent as SMS which is aggravating as it is to an international number. It is also not the first time, but it is the first time I have caught it "red handed."

The iPhone does suffer from unintended data leakage of this type. For example, downloads can persist when moving from wifi to cell which can be problematic when these are large and is especially so when the phone disconnects from wifi networks. The original Podcasts app flagrant ignored any number of explicit preferences telling it not to download data over the cell network. And, many international travelers have some experienced some "phantom" data way above that which might be expected from visual voicemail - this happened to me in 2011.

Upshot: there are preferences to mitigate against sending unintended SMS. But my own experience and Apple's track record suggests there is leakage.

A dumb possibility, but thought I'd post it in case it's relevant to anyone (as it was to me just now):

iMessage requires an AppleID login. Somehow my iPhone lost its mind and logged me out of iMessage, so the top setting in Settings > Messages was iMessage: OFF. This was the cause of the Messages app all of a sudden sending all SMS (green) messages to everyone to whom I had previously been able to send iMessage (blue) messages.

Settings > Messages, turn iMessage: ON, login to my AppleID, and I'm back to sending happy blue iMessages.

Hi XMasta,

I know it's been a long time since you were posting about this, but did you ever get to the bottom of this issue? I am experiencing the same thing at the moment and this thread seemed to deviate from your original question. I can't find any advice on this anywhere, people just keep posting links to the 'about imessage' which doesn't address the problem.

Thanks,

It's not just in Group Messaging that this happened, sometimes when you send iMessage to another iPhone user and at that moment the person is not covered in 3G or not under Wifi internet, after trying for a while, your phone will send as text.

My (very frustrating) issue is that I'm in and out of cell range a lot. At the moment, I am out of cell range while on my worksite but have good wifi here. For some people, i message them and it sends an imessage with wifi no problem but with others, i just get the error message. I assumed that it might be that their number isn't saved in my phone as in iPhone but even after changing that it still doesn't work. I am not thinking it could be that my number isnt in their phone as in iPhone but havent had a chance to explore that yet. At this very moment i am sending and receiving imessages to a friend but cant send to another at the same time. I can't quite figure out any rhyme or reason to this.

In addition, often when i return to cell range i will get duplicate messages from people. That is, the messages received as imessages while out of cell range will come in later as text messages once back in cell range. Not only is this annoying, but it defeats the whole potential cost saving advantages of imessage.

Anyway, looks like this thread is based on a slightly different problem but am hoping that apple will realize that this is a problem even almost a year after the original post in this thread.

Awnex wrote:

I assumed that it might be that their number isn't saved in my phone as in iPhone but even after changing that it still doesn't work. I am not thinking it could be that my number isnt in their phone as in iPhone but havent had a chance to explore that yet.

What your phone number is labeled as or what the number your messaging is labeled as makes no difference. Because I sync my contacts through an Exchange server, I don't have the option of labeling numbers as "iPhone". It has no affect on iMessaging.