Can't deactivate iMessage after switching phones?

Still trying to figure it our myself too. I have tried turning imessages on the device that I'm trying to receive texts from but that didn't help

except when imessage was off, when I turned imessage back on, it reverted back to immesage and I quit receiving the messages. I traded my iPhone in to best buy to get my new phone, so I don't have access to deactivate imessage from my old iPhone. Any hep would be appreciated.

I had exact same problem when I had to change my number due to harrassing calls, i still had the same phone (iPhone) so this may not apply or work for people who changed devices. Anyhow as another member said earlier, I could ring out and recieve phone calls with the new number, but messages were still going to my old number, and also at the top of my contacts my number was still showing up as the old one. I could message myself by sending a message from my new number to my old number. I tried reseting the phone and deactivating my account on the support profile page and non of it worked. I then went into message settings and turned iMessage off then back on, when I did that my send/ recieve went blank instead of displaying my old number, so I clicked on the blank space and it automatically popped in the new number itself, and now it displays the new number at the top of contacts instead of the old.

I switched from iPhone 4s to galaxy S4. After trying all mentioned above still had a problem with one of my contacts.

I called her and the problem was her stupid iPhone. Make sure the person who is texting from iPhone to android has the SMS turned ON. Other wise they won't receive nor send text from/to androids

I found that out bc the text she sent went to my iPad and not to my new great galaxy s4

It is easy for the sender to go to:

1 settings

2 scroll down to messages

3 turn ON the SMS. They can still have the iMessage ON too so the iPhone will use either one as needed.

It is a annoying to mess with the change but each company has complete different platforms and work different

iMessage works over data and goes among apple devices while android texting is SMS

After about 24 hours of trying to fix this by all the various means, I think the final solution I came up with actually works. I now have iPhone users texting me & being received on my newly acquired HTC One. As I'm sure has been stated before, ALL Facetime & iMessage accounts need to SHUT OFF on all devices associated with the phone #. All iPads, MacBook Pros, Air, iMac, iPhones, iPods, etc. Everything. Then, & most importantly, (& hopefully you still have access to the original iPhone that had the phone # on it), the phone can have no access to the internet. Neither through Wifi or through the cellular network. You can just shut off all cellular data &/or wifi. Just make sure it's not connected tot he internet. Once I shut that off, everything was seemingly back to normal. I can now only hope Apple hears the frustration of all of these iPhone users (including myself, albeit, I've traded out the iPhone for the HTC One for now) & decides to make this process far more seamless in future iOS releases. Really ridiculous this is even an issue.

Follow up to this post... According to the chat I just hat w/an Apple support rep, you must leave the iMessage account signed out for at least 21 days for the phone # to completely disappear. As long as you are signed out on all of your iMessage accounts, iMessage users should be able to text to non-Apple devices. In my opinion, this is a HUGE fail on Apple's part. Deactivation of a user's phone # should be immediate. They have no right to hold on to your # for 3 weeks, and keep it associated with any of their products. Awful user experience.

Same issue here. I'm not sure yet how to fix it, but here are three things I thought could be interesting to add:

- as most people probably understand by now: there is little chance contacting your provider will help. This is an international issue (I'm from France for instance), so whether you're with AT&T, Verizon, etc. probably does not change a thing

- I found out there are many iMessage apps on GooglePlay, agreed this is a terribly dirty fix and amounts to surrendering to Apple's forcing us to stay with them 🙂 but I guess some will chose this option to make sure they can be contacted

- finally, has anyone pointed out that when you google this issue, it looks like it's an old and widespread one (earliest posts around 2011)? I'm thinking that if great Apple, who besides can release crazy intelligent products, has not done anything about it, it's probably that they don't really want to... Let alone there is no official fix by Apple, only users communities. So I'm not surprised they're not helping when you call them. Among the tons of people that encounter the problem, I'm guessing a few will chose to go back to the iPhone. Hey, after all, there is no small profit!

Thanks to everyone coming up with solutions and sharing them 🙂

I have also experienced this. I temporarily transferred my cell service from an iPhone 5 to a Windows phone and was not receiving text messages from friends or family that had iPhones.

The only way for me to resolve this was to turn off iMesaage on all my other Apple devices. Apple needs to come up with a better way to resolve this.

You can read about my full experience here.

Hey there,

I have recently changed to the galaxy S4 and am having the issue of having my friends send me imessages instead of texts. I have an iPad as well as a Macbook pro with iMessage on it. I have disabled my iMessage on my iPad but my friends are still able to send me iMessages....any advice as what to do? I tried to get my friend to delete me as a contact in his phone and re add me, see if that works.

Any help would be great thanks!

Hi all,

Here's some feedback. I managed to get everything to normal by doing two things (whether both are necessary or just the latter, I'm not sure):

- remove iPhone (and, in my case iPad) from Apple Devices online

- remove iPhone from iTunes locally

FYI, I did NOT have to put any sim into any phone (although apparently it might be a solution). This is good news for those of us whose phone got stolen 😟

Hope this helps!

Another alternative to deactiving is signing into iCloud, and removing your former iPhone. I was having issues with the other method, through Apple support, but just successfully fixing the texting issue by removing through iCloud.

Simply:

Sign into iCloud

Click My Devices

Click the 'x' next to your former iPhone

Click okay.

Good luck y'all.

After I tried almost all of the tips listed above mine still didn't work. I finally did what I found on the Verizon site which was...

Turn off the old phone (i still have mine)

Take out the sim card from the new phone for a minute and then put it back in.

Mine worked after I did that.

Keep in mind I had already removed the device from the support page, turned off imessage on the device, created a new account to associate with my wife's iphone, reset the network settings and virtually anything else I could find online to try to fix this issue.

So far I have just tested it (Lumia 920) with my wife's iphone and it is finally receiving texts.

This was SUCH a headache to resolve. I feel like it's my duty to post what finally worked for me. My issue was I left my 4s phone on the roof of my car and it got run over (classic blunder). I was still able to plug it in to charge, but the screen was completely crushed and unworkable. My upgrade with Verizon is just a few weeks away so I opted to use my husband's old LG phone in the meantime. After taking it in to the Verizon store and having them activate it, I still couldn't receive texts from anyone who used to imessage me.

First, I deactivated the device from my account on itunes and deleted my phone number from the account as well, as others mentioned. Still couldn't receive texts from imessage users (I could hear the text being sent to my old, crushed iphone). I then tried signing in on my husband's phone under imessage settings, deleting my email and phone number from the "receive at" option, and turning off imessages. Still no dice. What I finally had to do was plug my crushed phone in to my pc, connect it to itunes, and choose "Restore iphone". Before I restored it, my phone number was still showing up under the summary tab. After the restore, the phone number space showed "n/a". Apparently this was the last link, because I'm now receiving texts from all again.

Hope this helps anyone else who's frustrated!

This is a really frustrating problem, and only goes to affirm my choice to leave Apple. Thanks for all the suggestions here. For me a combination of deleting my device from the support site https://supportprofile.apple.com/MySupportProfile.do, removing my phone number from the support site, then while on wifi on the old phone deleting my iCloud account and turning off iMessage in the messaging settings, seems to have worked. I don't think simply removing the phone from support was enough since iMessage was still turned on in the phone.

Hi all,

Just had the same problem but couldn't find my phone in Apple account so the issue was not to remove the device from the Cloud.

I managed to fixed this after reading this tread and the thing that worked for me was:

1. Turn of iMessager on all my Apple devices, they where iPad, MacBook Pro and iPhone 5. Had taken the SIM card out of my iPhone at this stage and had Wifi only when I turn iMessage off.

2. Waited for about 10minutes.

3. Restart my iPhone.

4. Send myself a Text message from the phone I was not getting the SMS from and it worked.

Hope this help someone. Yes, I agree that Apple really need to start listen to their customers....

I'm having all of the problems mentioned in this thread. The only solution that works for me is to turn off iMessgae and FaceTime on my old iPhone. This isn't an ideal solution because I still want to use iMessage and Facetime via my e-mail address. I'll monitor this support thread and hopefully someone finds a better solution to this problem.