Eli5 what os the difference between iMessage and text message and why it even matters?
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Text Messages are ‘SMS messaging’. basically, they’re using the phones’ phone/calling connection to send the message. Using the Phone number as a destination.
iMessage, or other web-based messaging apps, use the Internet to communicate… basically using the phone’s internet connection to send messages.
Why is matters?
because phone companies used to charge customers per-text, or had a limit on how many free texts you can send. Same is true for how much internet you use on your phone. You can use a wifi-connection instead of your phone’s data connection, to send web based messages without using your limited resources.
IMessage is an iPone/Apple chat app, it sends messages to an Apple server that other iPhones can check.
SMS is a build in feature of phones, its sending direct messages to any device with a sim card not just iPhones.
iMessage also allows you to send pictures to another iPhone in full resolution if you have the right settings enabled. (Turn off low quality image mode in your messages settings). Txt and pretty much every other web messaging app really lowers the quality a lot.
Little more info…
SMS came about almost by accident. It uses a spare channel on the cellular network. Originally this channel was used by engineers to communicate between cell sites. This was adapted to be SMS. The cool thing about SMS is that its available on all devices and cell networks. The bad news is thats it’s incredibly unreliable and difficult to use for sending multimedia, although in modern networks they’ve figured it out.
iMessage is proprietary and doesn’t use a special channel. It uses TCP/IP to transfer data “in band” to deliver messages. The TCP part allows for quality of service and retransmission which is great for multimedia.
The only thing that makes iMessage different than other messaging apps is that its integrated into the phones operating system. A drawback is that its a private service, if you want to use the network beyond what they offer, you have to pay apple.
The company I work for does incident communications. SMS is a royal pain, everyone wants to use it to send really important messages, but there’s no way to guarantee delivery and they often get lost or arrive late. We’ve tried to get access to iMessage directly but apple makes it really hard and expensive. Google has an equivalent messaging protocol to iMessage. It gets too complicated so we built our own app for messaging.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned: Apple says (might be true, might not, but I do not have the ability to personally verify it one way or another) that iMessage is encrypted end-to-end.
If true, that means no one can snoop (not a hacker, not Apple, not a government entity) on your messages when using that protocol without breaking/cracking that encryption first.
Actual Eli5:
SMS is a very basic text that only needs a very basic cellular network in order to work and only uses an extremely small amount of data in the process
iMessage is more complicated and has more advanced features. Outside of the self imposed ”apple’ ecosystem, it’s very similar to sending an online message through Kik or Facebook Messenger
SMS ain’t encrypted. Ur IP can see and store ur messages. iMessage is “probably” more secure. I wire probably because who can we trust these days.
Text messages/SMS are phone calls that are in text form.
iMessage uses the internet like WhatsApp, it’s sending short emails.
So iMessage can send with only Wi-Fi and no cell signal to devices that aren’t phones, where strictly SMS cannot.
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