iMessage Bug Causing Grief For Those Who Switch From iPhones

Let’s say for a second that you decide to dump your shiny iPhone to an Android phone, but you decide to keep your number. Besides horrifying the hordes of Apple Fanbois who would never approve of such a switch, you may be opening yourself up to a rather nasty iMessage bug that results in lost messages from other iPhone or iDevice users that are incorrectly delivered to their inactive iPhone, instead of their new phone or the message fails to get converted to a standard text message. Either way, the sender will see a “delivery failed” message when this happens and you don’t get your message. Now this is not a new bug and the Internet is filled with frustration regarding this bug.

The current workaround is to turn off iMessage on their phone and uncheck the number in other iMessage-compatible devices attached their iCloud account before switching devices. However this method doesn’t always remove the phone number from Apple’s iMessage server. That forces former iPhone owners to contact Apple to remove them from the iMessage system manually. Another option is to have family members and close friends delete your number from their phones and then add it again once you’ve taken the above steps.

I browsed around the Internet this morning and this story is really starting to get some attention in the broader press. Thus I suspect that Apple will be bringing out a fix for this to take the heat off. Hopefully that fix comes quickly for those who switch from iPhones to something else.

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