iOS leaves your phone number hostage
Benjamin Stein (Benjamin Stein), CTO of Mobile Commons, talks about the "worst bug" that he faced in his life. This happened after Ben changed his iPhone to Android. Soon, he noticed that he did not receive many text messages from contacts in the address book, namely from other iPhone users.
As it turned out, if a friend tries to send a message, the iPhone automatically sends it to the iMessage company chat, since Benjamin’s phone number is cached as an iMessage-enabled number. Naturally, the message does not come to the Android device.
Advanced users guess to send the message again as a normal SMS. But in the case of group messages (Group iMessage), there is no such option, so the addressee simply does not receive the message, without options. The sender does not even inform that the message to one of the recipients was not delivered.
Stein deleted iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime accounts from all devices and on the site. He forced technical support to revoke his certificates, so that he could not log in to the system, even if he had such a desire. That is, on the servers there is no mention of Benjamin. However, in the cache on other users ’mobile devices, it remains an Apple user forever.
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Benjamin talked to Apple tech support. He says that they strenuously tried to rectify the situation, but could not do anything. The company's official position on this issue is that every subscriber with whom Stein has communicated over the past five years must independently erase all messages from his iMessage. Obviously, this is an unreal scenario.
It turns out that Apple seems to create additional barriers and difficulties for those users who want to leave the homogeneous infrastructure. Perhaps the company does not even recognize this functionality as a bug, because the user's departure from the Apple infrastructure is a very rare case.
“I have an absolute feeling that I am held hostage,” writes Benjamin Stein. “They have no solution to the problem, and it’s crazy that Apple is holding my phone number hostage, but I can't get it back.”
As it turned out, if a friend tries to send a message, the iPhone automatically sends it to the iMessage company chat, since Benjamin’s phone number is cached as an iMessage-enabled number. Naturally, the message does not come to the Android device.
Advanced users guess to send the message again as a normal SMS. But in the case of group messages (Group iMessage), there is no such option, so the addressee simply does not receive the message, without options. The sender does not even inform that the message to one of the recipients was not delivered.
Stein deleted iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime accounts from all devices and on the site. He forced technical support to revoke his certificates, so that he could not log in to the system, even if he had such a desire. That is, on the servers there is no mention of Benjamin. However, in the cache on other users ’mobile devices, it remains an Apple user forever.
')
Benjamin talked to Apple tech support. He says that they strenuously tried to rectify the situation, but could not do anything. The company's official position on this issue is that every subscriber with whom Stein has communicated over the past five years must independently erase all messages from his iMessage. Obviously, this is an unreal scenario.
It turns out that Apple seems to create additional barriers and difficulties for those users who want to leave the homogeneous infrastructure. Perhaps the company does not even recognize this functionality as a bug, because the user's departure from the Apple infrastructure is a very rare case.
“I have an absolute feeling that I am held hostage,” writes Benjamin Stein. “They have no solution to the problem, and it’s crazy that Apple is holding my phone number hostage, but I can't get it back.”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/211216/
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