Q: My iMessage still says "Waiting for activation..."

riajul, you are genius man. I tried hundrads of solutions and nothing worked. Your solution is the simplest and the only one worked for me. Thank you.

same situation, im am out of the US, i go to school in europe. i purchased an iphone 4 in the US, and have had virtually no problems untill yesterday. i have been in europe for about a week now. imessage and facetime worked flawlessly and only yesterday did it stop. i have tried everything on this thread and am getting a bit annoyed because nothing seems to work NOTHING. Can anyone give me solid advice as to how to fix this issue?

if you go to "receive at" in the settings, sign out of your apple ID email and it should go back to your phone

i have already tried that, as well as various other techniques decribed here in the forum, but nothing seems to worked. i have tried restores, creating a new email account so that the messages may be recieved there, as well as using existing accounts to no avail. since i am out of the USA i figured that i may be because of that, but i began to think and realized that imessage works on wifi and with email accounts so the fact that i am out shouldnot affect imessage nore facetime. i tried checking the mail re-validating it as well, and get the message this email has already been validated. tried toggiling the on off switch, resesting the phone aswell as the network, but continue to get a waiting for activation error. nothing seems to work!

Message was edited by: dannyAG work*

It is a Carrier issue, not a device or iOS issue. Your iPhones are perfect, just that some of us have a bad or malformed entry on our provisioning profiles with our carrier. The problem is random and world-wide. Unless you can get your carrier involved trying to solve your issues, it will not go away.

Anyone saying a reboot fixed it, had a different issue and was just not properly configured.

Not always true. Maybe in your experience, but not in mine.

Both of my iPhones quit sending iMessages after leaving the US. Both phones were working flawlessly in the US on AT&T. Each phone is on a different AT&T account and has a separate AppleID. I could only send messages after adding an email address, but the phone number entry stayed at "verifying" status in iMessage for days.

Both phones immediately verified their number (for me) after signing out of my AppleID under iMessage, logging into the AppleID website and deleting the phone numbers from my profile.

Instantly verified, and I have zero cell service in this country. So I have trouble believing it's always a "carrier issue".

Hey finally got a fix for the imessage and facetime error i was getting, since every case is different this may not work for some people. since i am out of the united states all i had to do was change the dns server. what you do is

Tap Settings

Tap Wi-Fi on the left-hand side

Tap the blue arrow next to your current Wi-Fi network

Tap the “DNS” field and enter the DNS servers; 8.8.8.8 (Google’s Public DNS). For more information about Google’s public DNS, please see this:http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

hope this works

I was able to fix this issue just by starting the process of sending an iMessage to myself (at the phone number that was "waiting for activation"). I didn't even have to send it. Just entered my phone number in the "to:" line and clicked on the message window, and it changed to iMessage, and the "waiting for activation" message was gone from Settings > Messages.

Ok, Lets see if someone can help.

this new 4s is being a headache.

fisrt I was having trouble with the batery the iMessage was just fine, activated with my phone number on the "receive at" .
I asked my carrier for a substition on the phone and this week I got my new phone. the bateery still ***** and now the imessage don't activate. I tried everything you guys said: reset the network settings, reset all setings, restore from iTunes, clean restore form iTunes. (both times setting up as a new phone, in fact I never restored from a backup) now, nothing pops up, and there is no phone number and the infinity "waiting for activation"
does any one have a clue?

ps: on the other phone, without a sin card, facetime is now waiting for activatoin, but my phonenumber still appears even though there is no SIN card there. so I guess it's not a carrier problem since it worked before just fine....

thanks

I was having a tough time too for activating iMessages, i tried using the cancel option instead of ok, n it worked like magic... thank you

i was having trouble too, the endless waiting for activation until i did a reset of the phone, then attempted the process again and as soon as it said "waiting for activation" i plugged it into to my computer and it worked straight away.

not sure what this was but it might be worth a try.

You must have an active accout with your carrier. So, if you are a pay as you go customer you need to have credit on your phone and if you are a bill pay customer you have text messages available on your tarrif.

If you do not have either of these the process will not work as a once off text message to an Apple service center is charged to your account. This message needs to be sent or they cannot active your account.

I had this problem but resolved it by topping up my phone.

Finally got it working. After reboots, restores, account changes and many button combinations I've found my solution.

Settings > Network > Cellular Data > ON

then

Settings > Messages > iMessage > OFF & ON

after 2 seconds everything is working with my phone number.

I had exactly this problem yesterday, both on my iPhone 4 (which had been working on iMessage for months) and on my wife's iPhone 3GS. I spent an hour on the phone to Apple support, but they couldn’t fix it. All they could suggest was an appointment at an Apple store. Thanks to the suggestion above of using Google's DNS server (8.8.8.8), I managed to fix it on both iPhones.

Using my own proxy server, I found the servers that the iPhone connects to when activating iMessage. There are several, but two of them are deployed regionally with the same hostname but multiple IP addresses (and consequently multiple servers). I am in the UK and when I do DNS lookups, I get the following results:

init.ess.apple.com

82.96.58.9 from a UK DNS server

63.80.4.41 from Google's US DNS server at 8.8.8.8

static.ess.apple.com

82.96.58.47 from a UK DNS server

80.239.148.162 from Google's US DNS server at 8.8.8.8

The regional differences in DNS resolution are because Apple uses Akamai Technologies to deploy local points of presence, which are intended to reduce latency and intercontinental bandwidth. Therefore your iPhone does a DNS lookup on the hostname and a regional IP address is returned. UK DNS servers return the above 82.96.58.* addresses in Sweden; Google's US DNS server returns the above servers in the US, which I am guessing are Apple's primary iMessage servers. The Swedish iMessage servers seem to be deficient in some way, which is why you sometimes get this problem when activating iMessage outside the US.

After changing the DNS for your wifi connection to 8.8.8.8, you may need to restart your iPhone before trying to switch on iMessage again, as restarting will flush the iPhone's DNS cache. Otherwise your iPhone will retain the previous DNS mapping to regional Apple servers rather than to the more reliable primary Apple servers in the US.

Thank you seq2. Worked like a charm. Was about to head for the nearest Apple store to solve this problem.