Why Don't ALL of My Texts Show Up On My Laptop?

Factual Questions
1

My laptop is a MacBook. One of the apps in the system tray is called “Messages,” and it allows me to send (and read) texts just as if they had originated from my iPhone.

But not always. As an example, yesterday, I made plans to meet a friend for some face-to-face interaction, and I suggested that I bring along some sustenance, to which she responded that a poke bowl would be welcome. That exchange can be viewed on my laptop. What CANNOT be viewed on my laptop are our subsequent texts, in which I ask for her preferences wrt poke bowl accoutrements, and she responds.

Why does this occur, and more importantly, as the situation is NOT to my liking, what are the steps I need to take to correct it?

TIA

2

Check your iPhone’s Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding and ensure your MacBook is enabled and authorized. Also verify that both devices are signed into the same Apple ID and have Messages in iCloud enabled.

Also; your initial conversation was likely sent as iMessages (blue bubbles), which sync across Apple devices. The later messages about poke bowl preferences might have been sent as SMS/MMS (green bubbles), which don’t sync to your Mac unless you have SMS forwarding specifically enabled.

3

If they’re not already enabled and authorized, why are ANY texts echoing in the MacBook?

4

Blue vs green bubble is my guess.

If she is on Android you get green bubble messages. Blue is Apple to Apple and Apple gives them more love. It seems you can also sync SMS/MMS but you have to tell your phone to do it whereas it is automatic for Apple → Apple.

I am guessing at that and since FQ I will leave it at that. Hopefully someone else has more info.

5

FTR, all of my sent texts to an Android are in green bubbles, and ALL responses are in grey bubbles.

6

All responses are always grey. Texts you sent to Apple devices are blue and others are green.

7

As a pc / android user I use messages for web to text from my desktop browser. I see all the same texts as on the phone but video attachments generally don’t work. Just like Android though some texts from Apple devices are buggy, not showing up or sometimes arriving a day late.

Its convenient to be able to save images from texts directly to a the folder. HEIC images are a pain of course. Irfanview fixes that.

8

Were these missing texts immediately subsequent, or like 10 minutes, an hour, etc later?

Was the entire conversation on your part typed and sent out from the iPhone? Like, was some of the texting done on the MacBook and then disappeared from the MacBook, or was it all sent from the iPhone and never showed up on the MacBook at all?

At the time you sent the missing texts, were both the iPhone and MacBook in the same area/on the same network (such as work or home) or were you texting on the iPhone from, say, work, while the MacBook was at home?

Are you running the latest versions of both macOS and iOS?

Some things to try are quitting the Messages app and restarting. Restart the MacBook itself. Log out of Messages and log back in.

The Messages app, IME, has always been a little wonky. I wouldn’t say it happens a lot, but I’m generally not surprised by missing texts, texts out of order, etc. It’s the kind of thing that usually fixes itself eventually.

9

This.

I’ve also found that replying in the Message app will sometimes instead send the message as an email, if I have phone number and email address both available for the recipient. I’ve had to create multiple names for some friends, like John Smithtxt + John Smithemail. It acts as though when I try to send a txt message to a specific phone number, the system takes a step back and asks what are all the ways there are to reach the person, and then makes its own incorrect choice about which to use.

10

That’s my guess as well. SMS and iMessages aren’t quite the same thing, although to the end user they behave similarly. SMS are actually a sort of interstitial message sent in between phone voice packets on the phone network if I remember right, while iMessages (and all the others like Whatsapp, Google Messages, etc…) are IP network messages.

And often when you’re going between platforms, it’s mostly SMS, unless you’re using the same messaging app

11

The techie answer is because “Apple and Google don’t get along”. Cell phones have four separate, non-compatible messaging protocols: SMS, MMS, RCS (Google), and iMessage (Apple). The Messages app on your computer is fake; it doesn’t handle most of those on its own, only iMessages, but relies on your iPhone for forwarding SMS, MMS, and RCS.

If you want reliable convos, you have to iMessage another iPhone or Mac user (only), preferably via their iMessage email and not a phone number, because sometimes iMessages can downgrade to SMS when the internet signal isn’t good enough. Then, the moment you start talking to Android users, it will become extremely unreliable. The whole thing is a shitshow and it’s not your fault.

You can try some non-Apple forwarding apps, like Pushbullet, which may or may not have better reliability. But none of them will be perfectly reliable. It is always just a “best effort” attempt that’s subject to not just different messaging protocols but your phone and laptop’s wifi connections.

Beyond that, there isn’t much you can do except wait a few years for Apple and Google to work together better (or really, for E.U. legislators to force better interoperability). Apple was recently forced to start adopting RCS, Google’s protocol, but is only making slow, half-hearted efforts at it. Maybe it’ll get better eventually. The US isn’t doing anything about it, but the EU is doing more and more on that front and may eventually make messaging more seamless between the two worlds.

12

I have multiple devices and saw some similar issues where messages wouldn’t come through on all of them reliably. It wasn’t just a case of all SMS or RCS messages, but along the lines of the last message or two I sent to one particular person synced to my desktop but not not my laptop. I turned on Messages in iCloud on all my devices and that pretty well cleared it up.

13

Yeah, going with the information we’ve been given, it doesn’t really sound like it’s an iMessage/SMS/RCS (or Apple/Google) thing necessarily. It could be, but it could just as easily just be a syncing problem.

14

It’s a syncing problem caused by the different protocols, and also by the GSM & SIM model. It’s much easier for a proper single-protocol, multi-device service to sync up messages across computers… Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Meet, heck, even Discourse itself on the SDMB, can all do that pretty effortlessly. And even offline computers only take a couple of seconds to sync up.

But because the different protocols can only be processed by the right kind of cell phone (and only with that particular SIM card), your phone has to physically receive the message first, decode it, and then send a copy of it to the sync server, which then sends it to your other devices (with some level of success). Each of those hops is a failure point. Unlike a traditional client-server model, the chat server in this case isn’t authoritative, but must rely on the client (your phone) to forward its own messages.

Without that complexity in messaging, like if a single company controlled the entire service end to end (the way Apple does with iMessage), it can all be handled serverside with much higher performance and reliability. It’s also why Google Voice can seamlessly send/receive texts across multiple computers, since Google is acting as the cell phone “carrier” in that case. (Too bad Fi can’t do the same.)

It’s the interoperability across networks that makes it difficult. Trillian, the multi-IM chat platform of yore, would sometimes have similar problems trying to sync between different chat networks, especially after any updates, but in that case it’s at least easier because it was all done via standard web technologies and networks and not cell phone lines.

This isn’t a technical hurdle, mind you, just a corporate one… if the carriers and companies all got together, they could easily solve this. They just don’t want to, because blue bubbles help Apple exclusivity and profits. Apple only started adding RCS support because of EU pressure.

15

The OP hasn’t given us enough information to know what happened.

When you say

that isn’t correct necessarily because it could have been an iMessage to iMessage conversation. They never said their friend was using Android or something else. I mean, they could have been, but I’ve seen what the OP is talking about using nothing but Apple devices, so I don’t understand why you are forcing Google into the discussion.

The syncing problem could have been caused by any number of factors.

16

It doesn’t have to involve Android either. Messages on iPhone will fall back to SMS sometimes and that will be less reliable too.

The OP can clarify.

17

I just checked my laptop. There are missing messages from both blue- and green-bubbled correspondents.

18

I just checked my messages on my PC (using the default Google Messaging app on my Pixel phone linked to my computer via browser) and everything is there. Sometimes it is a little slow to sync but usually not more than 10-15 seconds.