Adam Pash, former Senior Editor at Lifehacker, has reported that Apple has recognized a problem that has been listening for a few months: text messages are converted to iMessage to later be forwarded to an Apple ID, even if it is no longer in use. This means that text messages sent from an iPhone appear as delivered when they have actually disappeared and are nowhere to be found.
After contacting Apple Care, Adam got the following responses:
- What is a problem that many people are having.
- The fact that Apple engineers are working in looking for a solution but that apparently is not easy to find.
- The fact that currently there is no solution. Some users get an error immediately after sending a message, but others report that the message still appears as sent and delivered.
According to Adam, the problem comes when an iPhone user switches to an Android device. When your acquaintances send you a message, they receive the bookmark as Delivered, even though the message has not been received on the new device or elsewhere.
When we add a phone number in our address book, labeled iPhone, the Messages app automatically converts text messages you send to that phone number to iMessage. iMessage is designed so that the user saves by sending text messages to other iOS devices (they are free), but when someone stops using an Apple ID, to which the number is associated, they start not receiving any messages sent by iDevices.
The solution currently offered by Apple is that we inform our contacts that we are no longer using an iOS device, so they must change the label where the phone number is recorded or delete it and create it again, taking care not to reuse the iPhone label where we enter the phone number.