> the pure simplicity and sheer genius of iMessage’s “SMS backwards-compatibility” approach that upgrades iPhone-to-iPhone communications to iMessage while transparently falling back to SMS or MMS where iMessage was not an option.
This "simplicity" comes with a price. If your primary SMS device is non-Apple and you sign into iMessage from an Apple device, iMessage will start eating your SMSes from anyone texting you from an Apple device.
Yup. I temporarily switched from an iPhone to an Android BlackBerry when the one with the slide-out keyboard first came out and I did not receive SMS messages from iOS users for the entire duration.
This "simplicity" comes with a price. If your primary SMS device is non-Apple and you sign into iMessage from an Apple device, iMessage will start eating your SMSes from anyone texting you from an Apple device.