Q: iMESSAGE WILL NOT ACTIVATE

Hannaabe wrote:

 

getting fed up with Apple at this point; been trying one suggestions after another with no success -tried these...

24hr wait, Airplane mode, wi fi, Apple id, phone number, Location, on/off, cellular data, imessage on/off. Mac sent message, nothing is working!

What are you trying to activate it on? Are you using a supported carrier for the iPhone? What error are you seeing when you try to activate it? The final step in the support document that you linked to the forum with is to contact Apple Support. Did you do that? What did they say?

You know that you must have International SMS (texting) enabled on your phone to activate iMessage and Facetime, right? If your carrier is a partner carrier the activation SMS request sent to a number in the UK will be free.

WORD on that !  I have done the same: googled everything & tried every combination of the suggested fixes (airplane mode, auto-time, location services, reboot, log in/out) and I CANNOT get iMessage to activate again. Regular SMS is working fine.

There here have been some reports of a *time-dependence* in recent incidences of this problem: on one of the iPad boards, there were reports that only Apple IDs created after March 2015 were having difficulties. My time-dependence issue us different : I'vet been using iMessage for ages on my iPhone 3GS, then 2-3 weeks ago, it abruptly bumped me out of iMessage and has since refused to reconnect. (I only found out because I was getting iMessages on my iPad - same account - but noticed my iPhone was not chirping at the same time.) I changed absolutely nothing on the iPhone anywhere near that time.

My immediate suspicion was that Apple had dropped iMessage support for iOS 6 -- I can't upgrade the OS any further because it's an "antique" 3GS. However in all of my googling, I have not encountered anything to support this suspicion. Everyone recently encountering this problem seems to be on iOS 7 or 8 ... but for me, iOS 8 on my iPad has no trouble with iMessage. Since my sister back home in Canada and students on summer break in Asia use iMessage exclusively to save SMS long-distance charges, while everyone on non-Apple phones uses only regular SMS, I must now carry around iPhone AND iPad everywhere.

I feel your pain, Hannaabe. The post by horsetoothres at the bottom of https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6789149?start=405&tstart=0 provides some hope that the problem is known to Apple. Cheers.

What is your error when trying to activate?

For me, whenever I turn on iMessage in settings, then log in my AppleID , I get the "Waiting for activation" message (for anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes), then Activation unsuccessful. Turn on iMessage to try again.   Always the same thing, and I have tried two different AppleIDs (one new, one ancient, both of which work on iPad running iOS8 and both of which worked on the 3GS until 3 weeks ago.)

You need to have International SMS provisioned on your account to activate iMessage.

YYou mean with my cell provider (T-mobile)? I do, I send international SMS messages regularly, it is the associated charges I wish to avoid with iMessage, along with the ability to communicate seamlessly by text message to/from non-cell devices. iMessage is a wonderful luxury ... unfortunately, I have now become used to it   o it is somewhat crippling to have it disabled on one device but not on another. For example: if I leave my iPad at home with iMessage enabled, and only have my phone on hand, OOPS: all iMessages sent to me will go to the iPad but I won't get them on the phone and will be none the wiser. "First world problems", I know, but darn it, evertthing was working until 3 weeks ago and I would like to know what has changed!

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Bringing in the iPad changes things. Go to Settings/Messages on both devices and see what address you send from and receive from; check different ones for the two devices if you don't want messages going to the wrong one. If you still get the "failed to activate" message try deactivating iMessage at https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage, then try again to activate it.

Thanks for your suggestion, Lawrence, much appreciated.  However the deactivation procedure just returned the message that my cell number is already not registered with iMessage, i.e. nothing to deactivate.  So the situation remains: iMessage working fine on iPad with latest iOS 8, on MacBook with Mountain Lion, but as of mid-June, *not* on iPhone 3GS stuck st iOS 6.  Before mid-June, there were no problems at all. To reiterate, it seems as though support for iMessage was abruptly terminated for iOS 6 and below (I made absolutely no changes to the phone) but I can find no evidence to support this hypothesis anywhere on the net.

I could find no indication that iMessage was dropped for older versions. And I just tried it on my wife's 3GS successfully.

What HAS changed recently is iMessage and FaceTime now require use of an app-specific password if you have 2 factor authentication enabled.