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Apple's Revenge: iMessage Might Eat Your Texts If You Switch To Android

redletterdave (2493036) writes "When my best friend upgraded from an iPhone 4S to a Galaxy S4, I texted her hello. Unfortunately, she didn't get that text, nor any of the five I sent in the following three days. My iPhone didn't realize she was now an Android user and sent all my texts via iMessage. It wasn't until she called me about going to brunch that I realized she wasn't getting my text messages. What I thought was just a minor bug is actually a much larger problem. One that, apparently, Apple has no idea how to fix. Apple said the company is aware of the situation, but it's not sure how to solve it. One Apple support person said: 'This is a problem a lot of people are facing. The engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it. There are no reliable solutions right now — for some people the standard fixes work immediately; many others are in my boat.'"

12 of 415 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fix according to Apple is by jrmcferren · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nope, Turn off iMessage on the iDevice before wiping or tossing. Been there, done that.

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  2. FUD. Pure FUD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ok, this is stupid.

    I recently switched from iPhone, and had text messages still going to my iPad. A simple google search revealed pages like:
    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5450235
    And many other such solutions.

    That requires having or borrowing an iphone or ipad (Basically, go to settings, iMessage, login with you apple id then tell it not to use iMessage for your phone number).

    According to:
    http://www.imore.com/text-issues-switching-iphone-android-heres-fix

    You can call 1-800-MY-APPLE and have them do it.

    1. Re:FUD. Pure FUD by gordo3000 · · Score: 4, Informative

      it's similar to the far more annoying issue in the google play store where you can't control you region and sometimes gets region locked to a region you are no longer in. So when I bought my phone and went abroad for a trip, the play store bound itself to that country and when I came back refused to unbind, even going as far to wipe the phone, wipe all address and credit card info in google wallet, and reconnect.

      Instead it took a week of back and forth with google help for them to just change a setting in the background that force bound my phone to the country I wanted. Of course, now that I have moved to a different country, I have another host of issues I'll have to go through this again.

      Both systems have idiotic limitations, for no good reason (and no, limiting which store I bind myself to based on copyright restrictions on a limited portion of the store is foolish, that should be at the app level with a quick IP address location check).

      Oddly, this is one of the best parts of the apple store. I can freely rebind myself to any store I want, regardless of my current IP. I just need a method of payment valid for that country and have no balance in my account.

  3. Apple Registered Devices by nazrhyn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Going to https://supportprofile.apple.c... and making sure my old phone was removed was what eventually fixed this for me. Just putting the SIM back in and turning off iMessage did not fix it.

    It was a while ago, so it's possible this might not be the exact right location; but, I do know that it was "removing registered devices" that I did. This seems right.

  4. IIRC by rabtech · · Score: 4, Informative

    IIRC this is actually an issue with the sending devices not being aware that the target contact no longer has iMessage enabled.

    It's trickier than it seems because iMessage will route to your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It doesn't know if you just haven't signed in recently or if you're gone forever. If I read a message on my Mac, it is a successful delivery, even if I tossed my iPhone in a lake and swore off cell phones forever.

    Apple should add a portal to manage this on icloud.com so you can see all your devices and enable/disable them from iMessage. Then the iMessage servers should reply when a device certificate is used that is disabled or deleted, causing the sending device to update its records.

    Remember - Apple acts as a key exchange system but the actual private keys only exist on individual devices; the sending device re-encrypts the message for each recipient.

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  5. Dupe by vivaoporto · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dupe from a couple of months ago: Apple's Messages Offers Free Texting With a Side of iPhone Lock-In Posted by timothy on Saturday March 01, 2014

    Time to copy all high moderated posts from the older article. Actually, there is no need: given that the purpose of posting this article is to bring the echo chamber rambling that this is why apple suck, simply posting "that's why I don't have an iPhone" is enough for +5 insightful.

  6. Re:"No reliable solution" by Ksevio · · Score: 4, Informative

    Text messages cost money on a lot of plans. Data is much cheaper.

  7. Re:Fix according to Apple is by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Informative

    Go to the website and do it there?

    Samsung has a nice right up on how to resolve the problem using any number of methods:

    http://www.samsung.com/us/supp...

    Have you people not heard of Google?

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  8. Re:Auto switches by Anubis+IV · · Score: 5, Informative

    For 99% of cases, that's exactly what happens. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug where in some cases that doesn't happen, and iMessage continues to try routing the SMS to the old iDevice, even though it's no longer valid. The bug was actually reported here back in February (making this story a dupe).

  9. Re:Auto switches by Thagg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just not true, or at least it wasn't a few months ago. My daughter switched to Android and I couldn't text her until she finally remembered her Apple ID and we could log into their servers and disable her account. We used the Samsung page for guidance, and it worked just fine. But by itself, my phone kept silently failing to send her messages.

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  10. "Archives for Nerds", not "News"? by s.petry · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is not "new" and should not be a top story. Here is a forum post started June 13, 2013 regarding this same issue. That same article discusses pretty much everything I have seen here, and gives the same fixes. Vodafone has a video posted from August 8th 2013 for how to fix the most common causes of this problem which can be found here.

    Slashdot has had discussion on this same topic, and nope I am not going to google that for people too.

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  11. Re:Fix according to Apple is by jbolden · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's actually what does happen by default. If iMessage fails to send for any reason and there is an associated phone number an iPhone will use SMS.