The Tech Rant

For part 2 of this topic, it’s time to focus on what is probably the most appealing aspect of iMessage. As stated on Apple’s website, you can “Even start a conversation on one of your iOS devices and pick up where you left off on another”. Now in theory this is huge! But unfortunately the second short falling of the service happens to have a somewhat large impact on this feature.

It all stems from the way iOS handles contacts with multiple numbers/e-mail addresses. In order to work on Wi-Fi only devices that don’t feature a 3G connection, Apple has given users the ability to use iMessage with either their mobile number, their Apple ID, or another e-mail address. This means that between 2 users, messages could be sent from mobile to mobile, mobile to e-mail, e-mail to mobile or e-mail to e-mail. However iOS doesn’t display these all in the same conversation and this is where the problem occurs.

Now if someone carries on with an old SMS conversation to a friend and they both become iMessage enabled, this conversation is locked between their iPhones. There is no way for it to be continued on their other devices due to the fact that the messages have been sent with the mobile numbers and not e-mail addresses. Is it really seamless if you have to manually work out which of your contacts have now got iMessage and then choose the correct e-mail address that they have activated it on?

Once again it seems to me that a simple solution to this problem would have kept things tidier. Seeing as a user has to add an AppleID in the message settings in order to use e-mail accounts, it isn’t unimaginable that everything could be linked to that. So if someone sends a message to a phone number or other e-mail address, the servers would know that it actually belonged to a specific AppleID, and always sent it there instead. Using iCloud, all of a users conversations could be easily made available across all devices. If implemented in this fashion, there would be two additional benefits. First, it would allow for the merging of conversations between people irrespective of the number/e-mail address used to communicate as it would simply be a conversation between two AppleIDs. Secondly, and more excitingly, it would mean that when a user was sat on their Wi-Fi only iPad, they would be able to receive iMessages that were actually sent to their phone by a user that did not necessarily know the other contact possibilities of that person.

It shall be interesting to see how Apple go about improving and extending iMessage, but hopefully this, and the problem discussed in part 1, will factor into any update in the near future.

Released as part of iOS 5 in October 2011, iMessage is Apple’s answer to services such as BlackBerry Messenger and all of the various other data-based free messaging services that have been popping up recently. As an enhancement to SMS/MMS messaging, it seamlessly kicks in when you send a message to one of your iMessage enabled friends, instead sending your message over 3G or Wi-Fi, therefore bypassing your carrier’s messaging plan! At least that is the theory…

After using iMessage for a few weeks, it seems like a single fundamental change to its implementation could help improve this vision of seamlessness. The problem is that for messages to get through to your device, the network that you’re on requires certain ports to be open for use. So as you’re roaming around, latching onto various Wi-Fi networks you may find that in some locations iMessage doesn’t actually work and when on a capable device, a fall-back SMS message is sent instead.

So here’s a hypothetical scenario. A user has an iPhone with Wi-Fi access at work which they can quite happily use for browsing the web, but due to the restrictive set up (for obvious security reasons), not much more actually works on the network. So when one of their contacts tries sending them an iMessage, it will fail to go through. However if they turn off the Wi-Fi on their phone, the iMessage will go through just fine and dandy over the mobile network.

One has to ask this simple question. When joining a Wi-Fi network, would it really be that hard for an iOS device to query the possibility of iMessage working? When in a situation where the service won’t be able work, at this point it should surely continue to use the mobile network for iMessage functionality, whilst still allowing the use of the Wi-Fi connection for other permitted tasks. This seems like relatively simple logic considering the amount of secured networks that exist today.

On top of this issue, there is another problem that I have with iMessage’s implementation. And to read about that, you’ll have to wait for part 2!