Leaving Apple's warm embrace
Sep. 12th, 2017 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xelaMy now nearly four-year-old iPhone has been flaking out on me with increasing frequency for several months, and for variety of reasons I've decided to replace it with an Android phone. One of those reasons is that Apple's warm embrace increasingly feels to me like that of a boa constrictor. And today That concern became less general and more specific when a friend posted about their difficulties sending SMS messages to a friend who recently punted their iPhone. Apparently it is a known problem that when you switch from an iPhone it becomes difficult or impossible for someone who is also using the Apple ecosystem to send you SMS messages: Apparently — I'm hypothesizing at least as much as remembering here — Messages.app takes over when two iPhones SMS one-another, and if one person switches to a non-Apple phone, that person has to jump through some hoops with the Apple infrastructure or their iPhone-using friends' messages will go only to that person's Messages.app instances (wherever they happen to have it running, or possibly nowhere) but not to their new phone as SMS messages.
I'm writing this here not least as an aide de memoire because I don't have time to look into it in detail right now. If one of you happens to know of good guide to switching from an iPhone to an Android phone without getting entangled in this mess, please leave a pointer in a comment. Thank you.
Logout!
Date: 2017-09-13 07:41 am (UTC)My stepmother just gave her old iPhone to my niece and apparently did not logout first and my niece doesn't know the password to be able to logout either. That seems to be why Messages sends "SMS" within Apple's infrastructure, because then it's free and you don't need stuff like WhatsUp.
As a tip I've heard many years ago, since this all started, in Messages, if you target the appleID, it tries first to send it thru Messages for free, but if you type the phone number instead it goes as a straight SMS. Of course, anyone from the apple ecosystem will probably just click your name and the software will try your appleID first. I have a suspicion (have not tried to confirm it) that people who actually completely left the apple ecosystem will never see the problem in the first place -- I suspect you are in a much better position than I am to confirm which version is true by asking your friends above.
In any case, my feelings point to how hard using Unix used to be, but people using Unix had been trained by people who *wrote* Unix, so we had more knowledge/experience than the current folks who just buy a tablet or a phone and don't know what to do -- over the years, Apple has tried to correct the more egregious cases by imposing new rules so people do not, for example, delete important system files, like /dev or /sys for example, because they don't know what the heck and they are "accidentally" superusers because Apple has not yet found a way to convince people to leave the first account created as an admin account and use their machines from a second, user, account.
Similarly, because of phone theft, they've increased the number of steps one has to jump thru before the phone can be completely wiped and reloaded so you can pass it on to another user. I suspect most cases of misdirected SMS will disappear now.
Either way, I have successfully given away my iPhones 3GS, 4S and 5S to family and never had the problems people complain about -- all I had to do was follow the directions of an Apple support article about how to deactivate your iPhone before giving it away/selling it. Basically, you need to go to several places, logout of all your stuff (iCloud [email, calendars etc], iTunes Store, Apple Store, App Store, FaceTime, Find My Phone, Messages etc). A lot of them are in the Settings application. Then erase your phone, which as far as I can tell will make sure all the proper things were logged out and deregistered, then wipe it out and load software to the point that it will ask the new user to proceed as if the phone was new.
I haven't left the ecosystem though, for a very simple reason: every time I visit the other ecosystems I am appalled at what I see, and given that I've spent many years elsewhere *before* even touching Unix (started with RSX-11M and RSTS/E, then VAX/VMS, with "visits" to IBM's DOS, OS/VS, VM/CP kept to a bare minimum). DEC's operating systems made sense to me, Unix was a second home but I *always* liked it. The old MacOS before OS X was nice too, despite its problems.
But I've bought a Galaxy S5 years ago when it was new, out of curiosity -- actually, a bit more than that, one of my brothers was visiting and I wanted him to have a phone to use figuring I'd play with it after he left (we put the phone on a pay-as-you-go SIM). I know probably more people who have Android phones than iPhones and they seem pretty happy with them, but I honestly can't stand them. My brothers use the S5 every time they come to visit, which is fine and great and all, but it would drive me nuts. Also, both sets of people, my brothers and my friends on Android seem to cycle thru phones way faster than I do -- I used to get a new iPhone every 2 years because that's how long the contract would last, and I do have friends who *always* have to have the newest phones and switch once a year, but when the 6S came out I bought it unlocked and without contract, so I'm gonna use it for at least another year or two, I like the freedom, despite the higher initial price, it has proved to be cheaper in the long run. I'm willing to be that there are plenty of people using Android phones older than 2 years out there, but the folks I know seem to break their phones more often than that and keep switching brands all the time.
One advice I heard though, is that your best bet with Android is to buy stuff that is not overstuffed with weird software from the factory -- I hear that Pixel is pretty barebones like that, which in this case is excellent because you are getting only what Google wanted Android to have, then you load what you want without interference with hardware manufacturers' crappy bloatware.
Good luck!
PS: found out the links you may want to read/follow to detach your iPhone from iCloud/Apple infrastructure:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351 (what do do before you sell or give away your iPhone)
https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ (deregister iMessage)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 (deregister iMessage on your phone or online)
PPS: you might want to ask your friends if they still have their iPhone and just turned it off or moved the SIM to an Android phone. In many cases people keep the iPhone for fear of not liking Android and thus think it would be annoying and/or time consuming to completely detach their iPhones from the Mothership, but then cases like failing SMS can happen. All they need to do is backup their iPhone and follow the procedure, in case they end up hating Android, they can come back to their iPhones by just restoring the phones from the cloud or their computers.
Re: Logout!
Date: 2017-09-13 05:38 pm (UTC)I was in fact primed to just pull the SIM card out of my iPhone and put it in a drawer until I heard about all of this. So now there's some planning in my future.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-13 01:20 pm (UTC)For Apple, the solution is that you have to completely deregister your device, which used to be rather complicated. It looks like they've simplified it, see here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042
no subject
Date: 2017-09-13 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-13 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-13 05:54 pm (UTC)in a facebook post from the other tall red-headed froshling I met
when she sat in the back of my car for the first MITgaard fabric trip of
the term, twenty-mumble years ago.