Q: iOS 7 iMessage won't activate

Worked like a charm for me.

Worked like a charm for me.

This worked for me. But I won't be switching to Farming-My-Data-To-Google, I mean, Android.

Hi Buragc,

Unfortunately it did not work for me.  I still can only get my apple ID to log on / activate and not my number.  I really wish apple would come out with a fix.  I am doing another full factory reset tonight and then I will try your suggestion again.    It has been way to long!!!

Didnt work for me either... Officially 4 weeks today no imessage from phone number

It works for me !
Thanks a lot Larryfilm. Happy to have my IMessage and my Push Notifications back.

If you do a hard shut down by holding down both the home button and the sleep/wake button on top of phone and wait for the apple logo to appear . you do not lose any data or settings ect and you will now be able to activate imessage and face time, Hope this helps

Larry, your fix did not work for me, but it put me on the right track to hitting the lottery this morning.  My iMessage has been broken since I updated to 7.0.3.  It worked fine on 7.0.2.  So here's what worked for me.  I'm not making any promises, and I don't work for Apple.  So I have an iPhone 4, 7.0.3 plus an iPad running 7.0.3.  The iPad was working fine, so I know my phone number and email will both work (actually I have iMessage to run through my number plus 2 emails).  Here's what worked for me:

1. Go to Settings > iTunes and App Store: Sign out of your apple ID
2. Go to Settings > General > Date and Time: Make sure your time is toggled to Set Automatically (green for go!)
3. Go to Settings > iCloud: Delete Account.  Get rid of all of your iCloud stuff.  You can bring it back later
4. I left iMessage and Facetime turned on (green for go).
5. Turn your phone off.  Wait patiently for a few minutes for everything to relax.  I am at work and I was doing other things so it was probably 5 to 10 minutes for me.
6. Turn your phone back on and let everything boot up. 
7. Go to Settings > Messages and see what's going on.  Everything had linked back up correctly, and my Send and Receive was showing all three addresses for me.
8. Go to Settings > iTunes and App Store: Sign back in.
9. Go to iCloud: Sign back in here.

This is what worked for me (don't start yelling at me if it doesn't work for you).  I think it had to do with iCloud for me.  I had tried every variaition, but I started thinking about what was still signed in that could be causing a sync issue and once I realized I could not "sign out" of iCloud and actually deleted the account on my phone, everything fell into place very fast.  I had done support chat with Apple and they were going to have me start erasing my phone and losing conversations and whatever else.  I knew this was not the way to go. 

Thanks for aiming me in the right direction Larry.

Good luck.

Mahler44 you are my hero. I fixed it....

Greece vodafone iphone5

THANK YOU A LOT

I think I figured out my issue.  I believe apple has now disabled the ability to have more than one iMessage account.  If you had more than one before the upgrade it only keeps your primary, after that the remaining are disabled but they don't tell you that, it just reports activation error.   I've tried on all 5 of my devices and I am unable to get any of my 8 apple ID's to take on any of the other devices

Thanks apple for another moronic move in making your ID system the most complex and frustrating in the world. 

Everytime i insert a different sim into my phone (eg. My gfs which is a different carrier to me) it

Activates straight away with the phone number on my icloud account, If i put my sim back in it stays with the activated number in send and receive..... My number always comes up as unsuccessful no mater what i do. I was leaning towards it being a carrier issue with the authentication message not being received by the phone but im thinking it might be an apple issue.

Apple engineering called me on Friday and there latest advice/suggestion was to try a different wifi network (facepalm) i have tried million wifi networks even at an apple store in front of a genius

I switched from Verizon to tmobile this afternoon on my iPhone 5s at 1pm. I was waiting for activation for the longest time.

I did:

1. Disable Cellular data and Reset my network settings. - DID NOT WORK

2. Erase All Content and Settings - DID NOT WORK

3. Backup and Restore - DID NOT WORK

I notice all my connected devices (iPad Air and 2nd iPhone 5s) did not have an issue logging into iMessage or Facetime. BUT I powered back on my old iPhone 5 and it had the same issues connecting to iMessage and Facetime. I was getting the same waiting for activation status.

I called up Apple support and we went through the whole troubleshooting checklist without any success.

But at around 6pm tonight, my iPhone 5s was able to connect and activate my cell number to iMessage and Facetime. So there is something fishy in the Apple backend servers.

Thanks for the solution!!!!

I have an iPhone 4 with iOS 7.0.3 and I went through those steps:

1. Go to "Settings">Scroll down to "iTunes Store & App Store">Logout from the account
2. Turn off your device, wait 1 minute or 2 then turn your device back on
3. Return to "Settings">Scroll down to "iTunes Store & App Store">Login (can take up to a minute)
4. And voilà! iMessage and FaceTime are back in business!

Note: it works without any need for a restoration.

This fixes as well all the problems in Google/Facebook/WhatsApp/etc. that require you to "Connect to iTunes to activate push notifications".

Thanks a lot to our fellow Apple Forumer Hunter Guerrero (see his valuable post here:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5318138?start=75&tstart=0).

didnt work for me????? i almost tried every thing...

What phone, os and carrier you with?