Apple Reportedly Working on Fix for Lost Text Messages Glitch

If you’ve ever switched from an iPhone to a competitor’s handset, you know the pain and suffering that comes with attempting to completely disable iMessage. The company’s otherwise excellent private messaging protocol has a bad habit of associating your mobile phone’s number with the service and refusing to acknowledge that you’re no longer using an iPhone, so any messages sent from a friend with an iPhone won’t automatically know to send their messages as a text message instead of an iMessage. To them, the messages appear to send successfully – but in the real world, the messages are stuck in iMessage limbo, never delivering the messages and never passing them over to the commonly used SMS protocol. This has resulted in a load of lost text messages, extremely negative attention for Apple, a potential class action lawsuit, and – I’m sure – hurt feelings over the past couple of weeks, which is why it should come as no surprise that an Apple company representative is now claiming that they’re working on fixes for “an iMessage bug” that involves changes both on the server side and on the software side.

Apple says that “the bug” – which many are taking to be the iMessage/text messaging issue detailed – has already been fixed on the server side, and that the company expects to issue a further fix in “a future software update”. This marks the first time that Apple has commented on and committed to providing a fix for the issue, which has been a longstanding bug existing possibly as far back as the very introduction of iMessage alongside iOS 5 in 2011. The full statement, which was provided to Recode, is as follows:

“We recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug which was causing an issue for some users, and we have an additional bug fix in a future software update… for users still experiencing an issue, please contact AppleCare.”

MacRumors noted just this morning that the site has noticed hits from users running an as of yet unreleased iOS 7.1.2 software update, which the popular blog suggests may provide a fix for both the iMessage issue as well as an issue that has left email attachments unencrypted for iOS 7.1 users. Apple previously committed to providing a fix for the email attachment issue nearly a month ago now in a prior statement provided to iMore.

So that begs the question, dear readers – have any of you been hit by this nasty iMessage glitch? I personally attempted to switch from my trusty iPhone 5s to a Nexus 5 handset just a month or so ago, only to find that none of my friends’ or family’s text messages – all of which were sent from iPhones – were arriving on my new Nexus. After numerous calls to Apple’s customer service, I eventually had to give up and switch back to my iPhone, figuring the ability to actually communicate with my phone was more important than the platform I was running. To this day, my Nexus 5 is sitting on my bed stand, waiting – hoping – for a fix. Maybe that day has finally come?