If you have unlimited messaging and limited data which one would you want to avoid incurring charges on exactly?
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iMessage is Confusing
- Thread starter TrenttonY
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Very true. But the amount of "data" that's being used is probably equivalent to the amount "paid" for unlimited messaging lol
iMessages are KBs in size. How much data are you using?
I think the situation is trickier than that. And we aren't getting the actual reasoning to the posters desire. Not to sound rude or speak of ones education level but I'd be shocked if he didn't understand that iMessage is probably the last thing on the iPhone to use up data. Like you said KB in size. Which is almost zero data usage to the average person. So having said that I don't think they are entirely to concerned about the data as much as they are wanting it to work a specific way. That would be degrading themselves to honestly be on here complaining about data usage from iMessage lol. Almost like complaining about how much data is used when your unlock your phone haha
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That won't work solely because what'sapp is for phones only. It's connected to your number. He is better off having Facebook and going the basic route. Seems iMessage is too advanced.
Question isn't tough at all. What service
Provider are you with that you are "charged" for texting? Or is this in reference to a pre-paid phone with limitations such as texts?!?
If it's already included in the plan you have or need to have for your phone then it's still extra nonetheless.
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Tons of plans still don't have messaging included. Not unusual at all.
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The ios7 block list is local to the phone so it sounds like you would be charged on the carrier side.
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You can use a noticeable amount if you often do a lot of picture/video messages, for exampleiMessages are KBs in size. How much data are you using?
The bottom line is that it would be an improvement of you could choose to send a message via SMS if you wanted to even if iMessage is available. You can kind of do it by turning off and on iMessage all the time, but that's clunky and certainly can be improved to allow it on a per message or conversation or contact basis.
each character in an iMessage is .1 bytes, so a 240 character message would be 24 bytes, which is like 0.02 kilobytes.... I mean you could send 1000 full messages before you would even reach 20 kilobytes of data.
Even if you were on a 250mb /month plan, you would have to send like over 50,000 messages to use just 1mb of data.
I think it's pretty pointless to complain about imessage using your data.
Even if you were on a 250mb /month plan, you would have to send like over 50,000 messages to use just 1mb of data.
I think it's pretty pointless to complain about imessage using your data.
That depends on whether or not you are with a service provider that wants to screw you out of as much money as they can and bill you for unreasonable things.
I.e., in most of the world, no. Because you don't usually (exception for roaming) pay for incoming calls and never at all for incoming texts.
In the US, possibly, because possibly you do pay for incoming calls or texts. In this case, yes you will pay for the blocked message because even though you don't see it, the phone still receives it as if nothing special was going on. The blockage is entirely phone-side.
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Every character in an iMessage is at least one byte. Non-latin characters and emoji are between two and four bytes. This is pre-encryption, which can bloat it slightly.
I understand they don't have it included but what service providers have "limited messaging" now? Like where you can pick a plan of 200 texts a month? I believe when iMessage came out AT&T got rid of limited messaging. They only have unlimited. Unless you have one of their pre paid go phones scenarios. I just don't understand what limitation the original poster can consistently have with iMessage when it comes to data usage. As the above post states the data breakdown of iMessage that we are all familiar with, I find it hard to believe that data usage is the main problem. Which is probably why we haven't got any response back and won't see one. The issue is more than data and iMessage. IMO
ok, i searched and this is what i found...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5220629?start=0&tstart=0
Even if it is one byte, the point is that you are going to have to send a LOT of messages to use even 10mb of data, I doubt anybody seriously needs to worry about using too much data with their imessages. Especially considering people with 250mb data plans are most likely using wifi a good percentage of the time, in which case iMessages are FREE.
here is more proof that imessages shouldn't be a concern for your data plan
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/imessage-vs-smsmms-messaging-and-text-data-plans/
And if you are doing a lot of picture or video messaging, where each one can easily be 1
MB or even more, what then?
then turn off imessage, or buy a data plan that has more than 250mb?
how many picture messages does one send? even to use 1gb of data, you would need to be sending like 30 picture messages a day, and every single one would have to be have to be over cellular. I would assume that most people with small data plans are typically on wifi the majority of the time so this is probably again, a non issue.
If it is, there are countless other ways to send pictures without using your data, I would hope someone who has a very limited plan would know that.
All valid ways of going about it...just as valid to wonder why additional controls to simplify it all on a per message/conversation/contact don't exist.
Am I missing something? It sounds like you want you don't want to use your data plan, but you're asking for an option that only uses data. Text messages don't use the data plan, iMessages do, so I'm not quite sure what exactly try to accomplish.
pretty sure you have all the control that you need. Turn iMessage on, if you don't want to use it, settings, messages, turn iMessage off. You can easily turn it on and off as needed.
I don't see a situation where you are texting 2 people and you want to imessage person A, but don't want to iMessage person B.
Turn it on, turn it off, And if for some reason you need a per person setting, it asks you if you want to accept iMessages when the first one is received, so just say no at that point.
Because Apple is about integration and experience. It's the only platform I know of outside of Blackberry (and Blackberry is dead, so it doesn't even count), where every message is synced across your Computer, iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Why fragment this? It creates confusion.
Not only, but iMessage is much easier to use than text messages. I don't even pay for unlimited text messages like I used to, because after iMessage came out, I went from ~2000-3000 texts a month to under 500 texts a month, since everyone I message uses iMessage or has Verizon, which offers free mobile to mobile texting anyways.
Also, as far as the US goes, all for major carriers offer unlimited texting. In fact, unless you're on prepaid, I'm pretty sure it's your only choice.
Also again, iMessages are kbs in size, maybe a few MB at most.
iMessage is just Kik, or Whatsapp, or BBM, or AIM, or whatever other service you can think of, but just integrated at a system level.
Also I can't think of any plan that gives 250mb of data that offers the iPhone, except for prepaid plans which are extremely expensive compared to their competitors.
Just because you don't see that need doesn't mean it doesn't exist for others. The workarounds are fine, but they still don't demerit the idea of more finer controls for those who might want/need them. Apple might very well not do anything more about it, but again that doesn't diminish the idea of those controls being useful at least for some.
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Doesnt change anything for those who are in those situations where it would be beneficial for them.
I'm trying to understand why one would need these controls, but since you can't give me an example, it sounds like more and more of people bitching (not necessarily you) that they need some very peculiar feature that nobody else would ever use just because they think it's the only way to solve some imaginary problem that they think they have.
iMessage is not a data plan problem, and if you need to send 1,000 picture messages a month, there are other ways to do it to save your data if you insist on having to use a feature and stay on a cheap data plan.
I don't know why people would need any feature other than imessage on or off, so please, enlighten me, and if you can't, stop acting like it's some hugely needed feature until you can give examples as to why.
Except anything "beneficial" is an overstatement at this point. If we were talking like, international or business security, yeah OK i'll give you leway there, but if you're talking about saving a couple of kilobytes at the most on sending a message, that's just a ridiculous excuse.
Doesnt matter what the reasoning is really--if someone would like to have that ability in a simple, quick, and straightforward manner, it would be beneficial to them.
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And if you want to use it sometimes depending in your connection, the person you are chatting with, what you are sending, what your plan is like, etc., you can certainly have a reasonable argument that for someone in your situation it would be beneficial to have more finer controls.
Yes, that is wrong. Unless compression is applied which is unlikely and then the 0.1 byte would be a damn low average for a text message. Especially counting protocol overhead.
Long story short (from a computer systems engineer): a single character like 'a' is one byte (in hex, 0x61). A character like 'ȵ' is two bytes (hex: 0xC8B5). This emoji is really sent as a unicode character rather than an image: #. It is four bytes long (hex: 0xF09F91A9).
A byte is the smallest representation of a number (0 through 255, or -127 through 127 depending on who you ask) you can reasonably send to the internet. Bytes themselves are comprised of eight bits (a 1 or 0). Bits are the absolute smallest representation of a number in computers. There's nothing smaller than a bit. Therefore, there's no way something can be "0.1" bytes, as that'd work out to be eight tenths of a bit. Which doesn't exist.
Then there's the fact that iMessages are encrypted. Encryption usually takes place on fixed-length messages (partially to make the algorithms easier and thus safer, and partially to hide the message length; a simple 'attack' and 'hold' message could otherwise be differentiated by their length for instance) so the message is padded to the required length in some cases. This adds another few bytes.
But all of this is entirely inconsequential where mobile data caps are concerned. Even the most limited data package will have enough space for thousands upon thousands of iMessages.
Absolutely true and exactly what I've been saying.