I was out last night, and over the course of the night, 3 different people texted me.
The first was an honest-to-God real SMS text message, came to my phone.
The second was a photo sent via iMessage, the Apple thing that is for all intents and purposes a text message, but if sent from one Apple device to another, it bypasses normal texting and uses the Internet. This one went ONLY to my iPad; I received nothing on my phone.
The third was a text-only iMessage. Got it on my phone AND the iPad.
So what gives with the middle one? Why did I not get it on my phone? Normally I get iMessages on both devices, I can’t think of a time where it didn’t go both places.
(for those not familiar with iMessage, it really is just like texting; you open the same app that you use for texting, and it magically figures out if it can use iMessage instead and thus saves you texting fees. If, for some reason, one or the other device isn’t connected to wifi, it goes through normal texting channels.)
Your phone may have been unreachable via the Internet when the message was sent. The sender needs to enable the use of SMS when iMessage can’t use the Internet for delivery on their iPhone explicitly - otherwise it won’t try. The fact that one of your devices got the message may have been enough to convince the iMessage service that it didn’t need to fall back to an SMS anyway. So your temporarily unreachable iPhone didn’t get it.
That’s a reasonable explanation, though the entire time I was out I was in an area with extremely good coverage. But yeah, maybe the sender didn’t have hers set up correctly.
The whole thing is a little unnerving, as the one message I didn’t get was work-related. As it turns out, it wasn’t a big deal, but still…
Don’t know how iMessage works but when you open it on the phone, is the message not there?
Just curious if it’s the notification that you missed or the entire message. I know two of my devices can get an email 30 seconds apart. If I open the email on one device, the other device will never do the notification for a new unread email because it’s no longer new and unread.
I only have one account, and the person who sent me the errant message sent it to my phone # (of which I only have one). I don’t think it’s an account issue.
Nope, not there at all, even almost 24 hours later.