iOS leaves your phone number hostage

    Benjamin Stein, CTO of Mobile Commons, talks about the “worst bug” he had to face in his life. This happened after Ben changed the iPhone to Android. He soon 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 was stored in their cache as an iMessage-enabled number. Naturally, the message does not arrive on the Android device.

    Advanced users are aware of sending the message again in the form of a regular SMS. But in the case of group messages (Group iMessage) there is no such option, so the recipient simply does not receive the message, without options. The sender is not even informed that the message was not delivered to one of the recipients.

    Stein has deleted iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime accounts from all devices and on the site. He forced tech support to revoke his certificates, so that he would not be able to log in to the system, even if he had such a desire. That is, there is no mention of Benjamin on the servers. However, in the cache on the mobile devices of other users, he will forever remain an Apple user.

    Benjamin talked with Apple tech support. He says that they tried hard to correct the situation, but could not do anything. The company's official position on this issue is that each subscriber with whom Stein has communicated over the past five years must independently erase all iMessage messages with his participation. Obviously, this is an unrealistic 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 such functionality as a bug, because leaving a user from the Apple infrastructure is a very rare case.

    “I have the absolute feeling of being held hostage,” writes Benjamin Stein. “They don’t have a solution to the problem and it’s crazy that Apple keeps my phone number hostage, and I can’t get it back.”

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