GrumpyRabbit on Nostr: _The Blue Bubble Trap: How Apple Can Make You Unreachable Without Telling Anyone_ ...

_The Blue Bubble Trap: How Apple Can Make You Unreachable Without Telling Anyone_

FTA: The employee at the Apple Store recognized my problem before I finished describing it. This week, my iMessage stopped working with no warning, no email, no on-screen notice, and no mention of any rule I had broken. I walked in expecting a rare technical glitch. He told me several people bring that complaint to the store every day, then apologized, handed me a phone number, and sent me on my way. I have carried an iPhone since the first one shipped in 2007 and used iMessage since Apple introduced it in 2011. Laptops, desktops, Mac minis, Apple TV, HomePods, AirPods: all of it runs on Apple’s platform, because Apple spent 15 years persuading me that everything would work together, and it did, right up until the morning the company decided I was no longer welcome in its messaging system and declined to tell me why.

Texas should make Apple explain itself. Attorney General Ken Paxton should open a consumer protection investigation into how Apple handles suspended messaging accounts, and the Legislature should follow with a narrow statute requiring large messaging providers to give notice, state the rule, offer a real review, and guarantee a reliable way to pull a phone number out of a proprietary system the customer can no longer use. I still do not know whether I violated some provision of Apple’s terms, whether an automated filter misfired, or whether someone compromised my account and used it to send garbage. Apple will not say. Its position, as best I can reconstruct it, is that I may have done something wrong, and that this is all I am entitled to know.

Continued => https://newsletter.amuseonx.com/p/the-blue-bubble-trap-how-apple-can