I'm sorry, Charles, but you are flat wrong. Apple cares about ALL it's customers, current and former. Former customers very well may become current customers at a later date. AppleCare has been rated #1 for customer service for 13 years in a row by Consumer Reports. There is not a single company on the planet that can approach their level of service. Yes, you do get the occasional advisor who is a jerk or just having a bad day, but those are pretty rare.Charles L. Cotton wrote:iMessages may well have saved people money at one point, but that's beside the point. Apple is losing customers to other phones, especially the Samsung Galaxy and HTC phones. It appears that Apple doesn't care about preventing a problem they know exists, likely because they don't care about former customers.
Apple's system is aware whether an iMessage is delivered or not, so why not 1) take the intended recipient's phone number out of their database when the message doesn't complete; and/or 2) notify the existing iPhone customer sending the text that it could not be delivered? Apple does the latter when a former customer turns off iMessaging, so it's certainly possible. The only logical answer is Apple doesn't care, even about former customers even if it creates problems for existing customers.
A key factor in this problem is the fact that Apple is knowingly hindering communication between citizens. I'm amazed that no cell carrier has sued Apple.
Chas.
As for this issue, I know for a fact that AppleCare Senior Advisors have access to the iCloud backend and can easily disable/enable parts of the system for iCloud accounts. How do I know this? Because I WAS a Senior Advisor and did things like this daily. Sometimes, in particularly odd cases, I'd have to escalate it to engineering. But those were few and far between. And those are always, ALWAYS, followed up within 3 days. Also, if you are getting rid of an iPhone (heck, ANY phone for that matter), it is in your best interest to wipe it first. Regarding this issue, wiping the phone would automatically sever the iCloud connection and, hence, prevent this from being an issue. An in-operable iPhone wouldn't be able to do that of course, but again, a simple call to AppleCare can take care of that.
As for the one lady in that article who got a new phone number that had previously been tied to an iPhone, that is a sticky situation. She didn't have an iPhone. Had never had an iPhone. So Apple does indeed have a liability issue severing someone else's iMessages connection to that number. In that particular case, pretty much all Apple could do is let it wait until it's lack of use fell out of the system.
Oh, BTW, I'd be cautious claiming that Apple is "losing customers to other phones". Especially since iPhone sales account for 50% (approx) of all smart phone sales in the US *AND* worldwide markets. Completely anecdotal, but of my friends who switched to Android phones (including the Galaxy), all but 1 of them dumped the phones within the 14 day return period and went back to iPhone. *shrug*