The failure of Apple’s iMessage service is a major black eye for the behemoth maker of iPhones. Apple’s messaging service has been experiencing bugs where messages fail to send (or take a long time to send) since the release of iOS 7 last year. Recently, many users that have switched from Apple’s iPhone to Android smartphones have reported that their texts are still stuck in Apple’s cloud and not being delivered to the intended recipient. And the problem isn’t new. iMessage has been trapping user text messages since iOS 5 was released in 2011.
The problem occurs after a user switches to another smartphone operating system but their phone number is still attached to an iMessage account on Apple’s cloud. Even though the user has a new smartphone, iMessage continues to recognize the users phone number as being tied to iMessage and then fails to deliver texts. Apple suggests that users disconnect their phone numbers from iMessage before buying a new smartphone. The iMessage bug does not affect texts between iPhone users.
See also: Apple’s Revenge: iMessage Might Eat Your Texts If You Switch To Android
Apple is facing a class-action suit in California over the various iMessage failures.
Apple has repeatedly attempted to fix the various problems plaguing iMessage, but new issues keep on cropping up. In October, 2013, Apple issued an update to iOS 7 that was intended to fix the problem that it said affected “a fraction of a percent” of iMessage users.
According to Ina Fried from Recode, Apple’s iMessage problems were made worse by a server bug that Apple attempted to fix. Apple promises a fix in the future, but does not specify when the fix will be available for users.
“We recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users, and we have an additional bug fix in a future software update,” Apple told Recode.
