Apple Customer Support Claims Apple Stymied by Phone-Switching iMessage Glitch

iMessage has been very reliable for me, but I know plenty of people that have had problems. Most of the time they had set it up wrong and I could easily correct it.
Not saying apple is blameless here, I'd say it's actually apple's fault, certain aspects of it were not clear and the settings were hidden away, making the set up for people who upgraded from iOS4 prone to having problems.
Not a case of 'it just works'.

It’s your own fault for not signing out of iMessage/disabling it on your device before switching to a different phone. The same logic applies if you sold your phone to someone and left Find My iPhone on, the onus is on you to turn that off, not Apple.

smithrh said:

That's a very interesting page that I'd never seen before.

However, given the fact that you just joined the site, I'll need a citation for this claim.

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Well I'm a Family Room Specialist that works for Apple, but okay.

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wandererking said:

Well I'm a Family Room Specialist that works for Apple, but okay.

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http://support.vodafone.com.au/arti...vate-iMessage-if-you-re-switching-from-iPhone

wandererking said:

Well I'm a Family Room Specialist that works for Apple, but okay.

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I figured you worked with Apple, the page you pointed me to is not a common one.

Understand I've been around long enough to not blindly follow advice on an Internet forum, but also enough experience to know when information may be good scoop.

Edited to add - will this work if I haven't switched? Can I de-register a device, then re-add it?

wandererking said:

Well I'm a Family Room Specialist that works for Apple, but okay.

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http://support.vodafone.com.au/arti...vate-iMessage-if-you-re-switching-from-iPhone

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I had this problem once before and this was what I used to fix the issue. Doesn't always work from what I understand though. This is a very bad problem and Apple needs to fix immediately imo.

dannyyankou said:

Is this the new "safari is snappier"?

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No, "iPhone 6 Mock-up" is. Duh!

smithrh said:

I've had too many incidents of "why didn't you return my text" to trust it. Perhaps it is better, but until it's flawless, it's off.

While I've turned it off, people still apparently can send me messages and think I've gotten them, which I haven't.

Fun times.

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To be honest I can't remember the last time it's happened. However a while back when I got my new iPad I unregistered all my devices from Messages and then reregistered them with my phone number set as the primary on all devices. I had devices that had my phone number plus several iCloud aliases and I was having an issue where if i sent from my work desktop it would send a new conversation to my wife from my iCloud address, even though my number was set as the primary for new conversations. I decided to delete them all and re-add. So I couldn't say for sure that iOS7 negated my issues or this reregistering process.

I have long had a suspicion that iMessage stores much of its data locally on the devices and there's supposed to be some sort of sync process that fails somehow on multiple devices.

Off topic, where are you from that you have a delectable spotted cow avatar.

I also sometimes get very old messages re-sent to my Mac mini, days if not weeks after receiving them on my iPhone as iMessages. SMS is disabled since I have no SIM card. I call it my iPod touch 3GS.

After I called Apple and had them disassociate my number with iMessage I haven't had any issue getting text messages. It is an extremely frustrating problem when moving away from an iPhone.

dr1ve0n said:

I work at a cellphone store. These two things usually do the trick.

- apple.com/support/appleid to unregister phone

- Text STOP to 48369

Or it does fix itself after 45 days

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Who/what is 48369 and how does that relate to iMessage?

Let's face it: millions of iToys sold, so it's becoming more difficult to get Apple to take care of problems that may affect several customers, but not enough to gain the "XX" % magic number.
It's only a matter of numbers, no more a matter of customers.

suprakc said:

(1) Well the first problem is android.

(I mean, don't whine at me for saying that - I had android for three years before making the miraculous switch to iPhone this year).

(2) The number must be specified as 'mobile' rather than 'iPhone' in whomever is sending the messages' iPhone... If that makes sense.

(3) cheers to the engineering team working on a resolution. I'm sure they'll have a fix in a month or two.

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Unfortunately as far as (2) goes the labeling of the number in contacts doesn't have anything to do with iMessage or much of anything else really.

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Scz said:

It’s your own fault for not signing out of iMessage/disabling it on your device before switching to a different phone. The same logic applies if you sold your phone to someone and left Find My iPhone on, the onus is on you to turn that off, not Apple.

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But there should still be a fairly straightforward way to do it (hopefully on your own online) after the fact if needed, like there is for disabling Find My iPhone (through icloud.com).

Or go to Settings >> Messages >> Send as SMS and enable on the iPhone side - which will send an SMS when iMessgae is not available. Annoying, but works for the iPhone sender.

Or you can just contact Apple support to have your number de-registered. Takes about 3 minutes.

kaltsasa said:

Off topic, where are you from that you have a delectable spotted cow avatar.

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Spotted Cow is always on topic! Went to school at Madison, back there often.


Going back to the Apple support page, even though it has 2 pages of devices(!) it missed quite a few, I wonder if that's a part of the problem. I may add the rest and see what happens...

The Phazer said:

iMessage was always a fundamentally flawed idea. No wonder it's gone wrong.

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Ah, yes, not just flawed, but fundamentally flawed, and from the beginning too. But of course.

Can't believe nobody posted this buuuttttt...

Have those that know you to simply make sure they have SEND AS A TEXT if iMessage unavailable selected in their messaging settings.

Sheesh, really people!? I switch iPhones weekly, and never lose contacts!!!

smithrh said:

Spotted Cow is always on topic! Went to school at Madison, back there often.


Going back to the Apple support page, even though it has 2 pages of devices(!) it missed quite a few, I wonder if that's a part of the problem. I may add the rest and see what happens...

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My list seems surprisingly incomplete on that support page as well. It's got stuff going back to old G4s and iPods but it doesn't things like the Airport Extreme I registered a few weeks ago. There's also an iPod color registered. I've never owned an iPod color.


I'm originally from the Platteville area. I don't get back up that way very often anymore. I usually pick up a car load of Spotted Cow when I do. Once a co-worker and I were at a conference in Green Bay and drank the hotel bar out of the Cow. By the gods we spent way too much money but it was worth it.

BuckoWA said:

Or go to Settings >> Messages >> Send as SMS and enable on the iPhone side - which will send an SMS when iMessgae is not available. Annoying, but works for the iPhone sender.

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Wide opeN said:

Can't believe nobody posted this buuuttttt...

Have those that know you to simply make sure they have SEND AS A TEXT if iMessage unavailable selected in their messaging settings.

Sheesh, really people!? I switch iPhones weekly, and never lose contacts!!!

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This requires all senders to have that enabled, which leaves it up to many different individuals making it a fairly untrustworthy solution unfortunately. However, perhaps more importantly, it doesn't seem like it would do much in a situation like that. Apple thinks your line still has iMessage enabled, so when someone sends a message Apple won't think anything is wrong and won't think it needs to be resent as SMS.

Wide opeN said:

Can't believe nobody posted this buuuttttt...

Have those that know you to simply make sure they have SEND AS A TEXT if iMessage unavailable selected in their messaging settings.

Sheesh, really people!? I switch iPhones weekly, and never lose contacts!!!

Click to expand...

It's more complicated than that.

I have non-technical friends (weird, I know) and some of them rely on iMessage as SMSs can cost big money when delivered overseas. I've made them make that change, but that's screwed them up for THEIR contacts.

Initially, I made the settings change for them, but they didn't like it so they set it back.

Wide opeN said:

Can't believe nobody posted this buuuttttt...

Have those that know you to simply make sure they have SEND AS A TEXT if iMessage unavailable selected in their messaging settings.

Sheesh, really people!? I switch iPhones weekly, and never lose contacts!!!

Click to expand...

I think the issue is the senders phone thinks iMessages is available for the recipient and sends it as an iMessage never to be seen again (ie the recipient has switched to an android device, etc...). So the sender would have to disable iMessage completely, which is undesirable. If I'm understanding correctly.

C DM said:

Who/what is 48369 and how does that related to iMessage?

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It just verifies that your phone can send and receive silent SMS routing, which is how iMessage activates and deactivates. Sending STOP won't in and of itself resolve this issue, but will show that it isn't a problem with your carrier.

Here are the things he has already tried to fix the problem:

For the record, I still have my old iPhone, so I can easily swap the SIM card back into it and perform common fixes. Here are at least a few of the things I’ve tried:

1. Reset my Apple ID password
2. Log out of Messages and FaceTime on all my devices
3. Text STOP to 48369
4. Remove my device from My Support Profile

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http://adampash.com/how-i've-tried-to-fix-imessage/

well one solution would be to get your carrier to just give you a new phone number. Not ideal but I am sure that would solve the issue

Every time there's an issue with an Apple product some stupid fanboi says they don't have this problem so it doesn't exist. They're defending Apples honor because they themselves have none.