A few weeks ago, I was using Apple’s iMessage messaging service on the iPhone, making plans to see a movie with a group of friends. Suddenly they stopped replying, and about an hour later I saw them check in at the movie theater on Foursquare.
A little hurt, I sent them a follow-up message: “You guys went without me? Jerks!”
The following morning my iPhone exploded with about a dozen messages from my friends discussing when and where they were meeting to see the movie.
In other words, they didn’t get my messages, and I didn’t receive theirs until a day later, and I missed the movie as a result. Apple’s iMessage is an Internet-based service, and I had cellphone reception as well as a Wi-Fi connection that should’ve transferred these messages just fine. Later, I found out that a few more of my friends and some colleagues were experiencing the same problem — long delays before messages were received, and in some cases, messages that never went through at all.
We weren’t alone. Dozens of iPhone or iPad users have been reporting similar issues in Apple’s support forums. Some writers at TidBITS, an Apple news publication that occasionally offers troubleshooting tips, have experienced similar issues. Glenn Fleishman, a TidBITS contributor, said that when he was in Washington recently, iMessage would fail or have long delays, even while his iPhone could browse the Web and do other network-based activities.
He said the problem was probably a system design issue, because it appears Apple is not keeping up with the volume of what’s passing through its servers.
“It’s possible Apple is handling a billion messages a day already, and they always seem to have issues with scaling any service,” he said.
After it happened to me a fourth time, I complained about it on Twitter, and one of my followers came forward with a possible fix: uninstall Messages Beta, an early version of iMessage for the Mac that Apple released in February. Some of my friends and I have done just that and haven’t experienced the problem since. Mr. Fleishman said he also uninstalled Messages Beta on his Mac because of unreliability.
While it’s expected that beta software is unfinished and you use it at your own risk, it’s abnormal for a beta version of one product (Messages Beta for Mac) to affect a finished app on a different product (iMessage for iPhone).
Apple declined to comment, and the company has not acknowledged the issue in its support bulletins. But if you’re experiencing the same problems and you happen to have Messages Beta installed on your Mac, try uninstalling it — and make sure to tell your friends to remove it as well.
Gadgetwise
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