iPhone won’t text non-Apple phone unless WiFi is not available.

hog'sbreath wrote:

When both cellular and WiFi networks are available, my iPhone will always MMS other iPhones but will sometimes not SMS non-Apple phones. When I receive a message bubble that the message failed to send, I turn off my WiFi and resend. This always works to send an SMS to non-Apple phones but is a royal PITA especially when I forget to turn WiFI back on after.

This problem is more frequent with group texts to mixed types of phones but also occurs from time to time to single non-Apple phone recipients.

When I first encountered this problem with my white iPhone 7+, I wondered if there may be a racial issue but problem has continued when I recently replaced that phone with a black and blue iPhone 12 Pro.

Setup of the new phone was done automatically from the old phone. I am running software version 14.5.1 and an update is scheduled for tonight.

I have reviewed past posts and other sources that recommend renaming address book entries as mobile rather than iPhone, adding country codes to numbers, logging out and back in to MMS, warm booting/cold booting and even resetting your phone. I have tried all of these over the years except the last which is silly. None of these work.

Are there some settings that need to be changed for my phone to differentiate the need for SMS and MMS depending on the type of phone being texted? Or is this a short coming in the operating system. I suspect that if I turn off MMS so that all texts are sent by SMS, all my texts will go out but texts sent to me from some Apple phones may not arrive.

Thank you for any support.

What did your phone carrier say when you reported the issue to them? SMS and MMS is a phone carrier feature.