I bought my mother a MacBook Air for Christmas.

About a year back, I’d switched to a secondhand iPhone, but my family is all on Android. I have her email saved in her contact information on my phone, and that email is now associated with her Apple ID, which is now associated with a device that supports iMessage. My texts to my mother therefore switch over to iMessage automatically.

These, of course, do not show up on her phone anymore.

Logging her Apple ID out of the Messages app on the MacBook does not fix this.

It takes me, a Professional Computers Person, a bit to figure out there is a dropdown in Messages on my phone that will let me force my texts to go through SMS and thus reach her phone – but nothing about the messaging interface would have made clear that I needed to do that if I did not know in advance. Even after she was logged out of Messages on the Mac, the happy little blue bubbles looked on my phone to be delivered just fine.

So now I begin to panic slightly.

Most people are not even fractionally as tech savvy as the average reader of this blog post. By buying my mother a gift, I have now made it so that her contacts with iPhones, who all have her email saved, will – by default – send her messages that she cannot access on her phone, and they won’t know that they’re doing this when trying to text her.

This seems terrible. Apple must have a way to fix this, right?

Well, while there is a settings pane that Apple suggests should be able to remove iMessage reachability by her email, the checkbox is checked and can’t be toggled. (Perhaps because she doesn’t have a phone number associated, and something must be there? They don’t seem to explain why, anyway.)

And while I’m searching around, aghast at the idea that this can’t be fixed within three clicks, every second or third thing I find on the topic suggests

lol just get an iphone

I am appalled.

My mother suggests she ask everyone she knows with an iPhone to delete her email.

A disclaimer

I’m writing this day-of, so there very well may yet be some solution I can find – but at the same time, it was so easy to get into this situation (by default!) that I’d bet big money there are a lot of people living with how broken it is. At this point, even if there is some workaround somebody can tell me about (set up a new secret garbage email alias for her Apple ID and only mark that one as reachable via iMessage?), I feel pretty strongly that there’s still a problem here.

I self-host a Matrix instance1. That’s the tech underlying a lot of what Beeper does, so I’ve been following the whole story pretty closely where Beeper wanted to open up iMessage to Android users, and Apple wanted very much that it not be opened.

A common strand of techie sentiment I read in comments about this stuff goes something like:

Look, probably Apple should make their stuff interoperable. The world would be a better place if messaging were end-to-end encrypted by default. But they should also be able to run an exclusive messaging service if they want, and it’d be freeloading for the rest of us to rely on their servers and infrastructure if we don’t buy their stuff. Nobody has a right to iMessage, and it’s not anticompetitive to just… build a proprietary messaging thing.

There’s something to that, but there’s also something missing. SMS objectively sucks, so it’s understandable that commentary doesn’t tend to frame it this way – but iMessage is a parasite on SMS. If Apple designs its stuff to smoothly and silently upgrade away from SMS – even to the point of making someone unreachable-by-default on her Android – then all the inevitable frictions on the boundary of those systems are an externalized cost to iMessage’s parasitism that scales with Apple’s dominance. If they’d just built their own thing in a separate app that needed both sides to explicitly opt-in to use in their communication, I wouldn’t be writing this!

Yeah, I know they’re not the only ones trying to leverage SMS-parasitism – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger at least used to do it, Signal, whoever else – but I’m hard-pressed to think of a comparable situation those other companies can get you into. (Maybe the general pattern of letting people send messages to someone who’s installed then uninstalled the app? Sorry to anyone who’s tried to contact me on Signal or Snapchat over the past decade.)

Anyway, if I were someone with any power (I am not), and I had the ability to influence the relevant US antitrust investigations (I do not)… I’d try to get people to think carefully through how Apple isn’t just bundling an application, but instead actively undermining a non-proprietary thing that users may be intending to use.

  1. It’s actually what my mom and I mostly use since the demise of Allo. ↩