iMessages is really cool, and apparently it gives AT&T’s CEO bad dreams of happy customers because it gives us sweet little SMS messages for free. For the most part, iMessages works really well, except there are times when messages get all delayed you miss some important conversations between friends. Brian Chen at the New York Times’ and a number of other iMessage users have been experiencing frequent delays lately with their messages, but here’s a quick way to fix it.
The problem with messages being delayed is usually caused by a problem by an early version of iMessage for the Mac that Apple released in February. The relay between the OS X iMessages beta client and the version on your iOS devices sometimes gets bogged up and messages don’t get send to your iOS devices as quickly. To fix it so that you receive your iMessages in a timely manner on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you should try uninstalling the Messages beta client on your Mac so that the cache can catch back up on all synced devices. Here’s how to uninstall the beta in three simple steps:
- From the Messages application menu, choose Uninstall Messages Beta….
- A dialog will appear, asking you to confirm uninstallation of Messages Beta and reinstallation of iChat. Verify that you wish to do this.
- Restart your Mac when prompted.
I haven’t experienced this bug because I rarely use iMessages on the Mac, but if you’ve been afflicted, we’d love to hear your story in the comments below.
Source: NYT
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
10 responses to “Here’s How To Fix The Lag In Your Buggy iMessages”
Sounds a bit like my favorite solution for Windows problems: Boot to command line. Type FDisk. Select your Windows partition. Select “Delete”.
Uninstall the OS X client from your Mac and the iOS version will work better. You can try reinstalling the OS X beta if you’d like to afterwards
I’m not seeing where a Messages function is in the iChat client, though.
Or … wait until software is out of beta before expecting perfect performance?
Basically, they get a lot of readers by posting a lot of inflammatory shite which forces people to post even if only out of anger and disgust.
So i have to say that was a worthless post if i ever saw one,,, did someone get paid to post that? if so, please sign me up,, i can do that all day long!,,lol
@Tim Lanfair what are you talking about? No one is “dissing” Apple unfairly. There is a known issue where some iMessage users experience a delay in receiving their messages on their iOS devices. To solve it, users need to delete the Messages beta app from their Mac so they can at least have a good experience on their iOS device using iMessages and then reinstall the latest beta build of Messages for OS X. The problem and solution are both real and have been verified by The New York Times. What more would you like?
I use to have big time lags with iMessage. Apple tech told me to turn iMessage off, hard reboot iPhone, then turn iMessage back on. Haven’t experienced lags since.
Thanks Buster. This was really helpful. I like iMessages but the lag was interferring with communication.
And what about those that have never installed the Messages Beta. Cause out of no where my iMessages stopped syncing between my iPhone and iPad. And more annoyingly even if I send it from my iPad, the reply only comes to my iPhone.