Not receiving iMessage on Android phone

Hi Frank7092,

Thank you for posting in the Apple Support Communities. I understand you have some questions regarding iMessage and Android devices.

"iMessages are texts, photos, or videos that you send to another iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac over Wi-Fi or cellular-data networks. These messages are always encrypted and appear in blue text bubbles. "

As stated above, iMessage is not available on Android devices.

"If you aren’t using iMessage, you can use SMS/MMS. These messages are texts and photos that you send to other cell phones or another iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. SMS/MMS messages aren't encrypted and appear in green text bubbles on your device."

Your friends will always see your messages as green bubbles, if you are using an Android device.

You can read more about the differences within the resource I've linked below.

• About iMessage and SMS/MMS

Cheers!

Frank7092 wrote:

iMessage users see my phone as GREEN (iPhone). It should show BLUE (other-Android). So messages don't come to my phone. They go to the void. A friend fixed this by removing my email from his contact, but this is not a solution. Friends need to contact me both by text and by email. If that is the only "solution", this is an Apple bug that needs to be fixed. My email is attached to an Apple account. That does not mean I have an iPhone. I don't. As far as I can tell, there is no way to communicate with Apple to report a problem.

You've got it backwards. Green = SMS, Blue = iMessages. iMessage is only available to iPhone users. However, not all iPhone users chose to do so. If they don't, their messages will also be green.

Did you ever have an iPhone? If so, did you turn off iMessage before you stopped using the phone? If not, you'll need to deregister your number.

Deregister iMessage on your iPhone or online - Apple Support

Hi,

Also do you have an iPad or Mac that can do iMessages ?

That may explain why you are not getting the replies as they have in fact been sent as iMessages which your phone will not see.

The issue of Messages is that all incoming messages are seen as grey items. It is only the outgoing items that end up with coloured bubbles.

With iChat you dis at least get incoming bubbles that were coloured and icons that appeared in Buddy Lists (that you could display separately) so you had an idea which service (AIM, Jabber ,which includes Googletalk and Yahoo) they were using.

You might also want to look at hhttps://mysupport.apple.com/

Here, when you are logged in, you can check how many devices are using your Login and you may find old phones and devices that might explain the situation.

Ralph