Correction: My previous posting is erroneous. I profusely apologize to you and everyone who read it.
I recently exchanged multiple iMessages, chat style, via my iPhone, with one of my contacts. Several iMessages sent and received in short order. Several hours later, I opened the Messages app on the Mac (which had been asleep.) After several seconds, I saw the iMessages I had sent earlier from the iPhone pour in. But not the ones I had received! After a minute or two, the ones I had received poured in, interleaved with the ones I had sent with all ending up in proper actual chronological order. So the Messages app on the Mac does have the ability to properly sort according to actual chronological order even when messages don’t actually come into it that way. Yet it clearly doesn’t always do so. Furthermore, although it tends to be less often and less extreme and, thus, less noticeable, the same is true for Messages on the iPhone!
I did a tedious, detailed audit of this one long, busy conversation going back a few months and have discovered myriad, manifold discrepancies!
Examples:
The most obvious being on the Mac. Some messages, iMessage as well as SMS-fall-back, being way out of actual chronological order on the Mac despite the meta-data date/time being almost if not exactly right on. Some of these are out of order by as much as 10 or 11 hours. Some groups of messages have a LOT of chronologous scatter!
Less obvious chronology scatter on the iPhone. Some messages out of actual chronological order on the iPhone but only by a few minutes. Some of these are out of order the same way on both the iPhone as well as the Mac. Some are out of order more extremely on the Mac than the iPhone. Some are out of order just on the iPhone. But none are out of order on the iPhone by more than a few minutes. This includes some rare instances of SMS-fall-back as well as pure iMessages.
A few instances of messages that appear as iMessage on the Mac versus SMS-fall-back on the iPhone as well as vice versa.
Here’s a good one: A received message appearing on the Mac once as iMessage and again as SMS-fall-back with meta-data time 5 minutes later. It appears only once on the iPhone, that being iMessage but with meta-data time matching the later SMS-fall-back one on the Mac. Also, the SMS-fall-back message on the Mac is out of actual chronological order by about 2 and a half hours.
Finally, some iMessages that are otherwise identical between devices, actually have a different meta-data time between devices! Some by as much as 5 minutes, that I’ve seen, which isn’t much. Obviously this, although it’s not the only thing, does have a bearing on sort order discrepancies. Although not enough that I would have normally noticed.
Bottom line: Something’s not completely baked. Myriad and manifold discrepancies abound! As far as apparent sort order versus de facto meta-data time, for any given message, chronologous disorder can occur on either device but not the other or the same way or different ways on both! Sometimes it involves SMS-fall-back, sometimes not. In my case, such disorder on the iPhone is always so small I wouldn’t normally notice it. On the Mac it can be huge (several hours or more) with manifold chronologous scatter within any short-order group of messages!
But I still love it despite these minor, occasional issues. I appreciate the ability to quasi-synchronize messages on multiple devices via the Messages app.
