iOS 7 Contact with multiple FaceTime ID

Sorry, contact list for FaceTime. Previous post.

Hi ! I have the same issue as I have 2 iphones and a mac on ios 7 and Maverick.

When people call me they reach all 3 devices if they have the numbers and the mail that links to them in the same contact file. Telling everyone to divide my contact file that into 3 seperate file is out of question.

If you read the feature presented by Apple on this page : https://www.apple.com/ios/facetime/

In step 3 all the numbers and details usable by Facetime appear : phone numbers (all if you have several iphones) and mails and Apple ID.

Then you can select which email addresses and phone numbers you want people to use to contact you for FaceTime calls.

Q : on this particular device or for all of them?

Anyway this feature doesnt work as whatever I select, I got the call on all your devices.

Well it's been approx seven months now, and still no answers, or updates to solve this problem!

So I am forced to carry all my devices with me, to stop people intercepting a facetime call should I leave something behind, or I am required to lock my devices set them to silent and tell everyone at home to buy their own stuff and stop using mine!

Great choices! Come back ios6 we all miss you!

FIX IT THE BUG, APPLE!!!!

So I'm willing to add my voice as well. There are a couple features in iOS that are not well thought out (IMHO), but also are very poorly documented. Ok, not documented at all. The happy-talk Apple website showing how one person on one phone can Facetime one person on their one phone is happyhappy, but of course isn't how it is for Apple's best customers. I often wonder if the poor (non-existent) documentation of how "simple" but actually complicated features like iMessage and Facetime really work (exactly how they work) reflects the poor understanding within Apple of how the software is actually coded.

So my wish #1 is for Apple to start posting real, complete documentation for those of us with multiple iPhones, multiple iPads, multiple desktop/laptops, and our contacts with this much or more and even non-iOS devices. Apple, we are your best customers. We become your best customers by buying many devices, and we need more than a Mickey Mouse hand waving understanding of how we can control it. I should not have to spend time with a friend turning on and off things to try to reverse engineer how these features are supposed to work. After spending $7-8K on Apple stuff, I should feel this much frustration because I'm doing your job?

All, the feature that is driving us wild is called (in the industry) single-number reach. The concept is quite logical if you're an equipment/system designer. What if someone has a bunch of devices (typically multiple phone numbers... such as a work phone and a mobile phone). Wouldn't it be cool if you could just call one number and both numbers would ring? Single number reach to avoid the drudgery of calling one number, hanging up, calling the other number, hanging up... let me try their home number... etc. So our AppleID is the underlying single number reach.

But that's just one use case. What I call "one-to-many". I want to call from my one device to many.

The real world is even more complicated as there is now audio and video. Someone might have 3 audio numbers (ids), and 3 video ids. What then? Apple has failed (big time) because they designed for a single use case, and then went home in their fancy cars to their big homes feeling satisfied. (sorry, snarky rules today)

My use case is my wife is traveling with her iPhone (she has her own AppleID). When I Facetime her (from one of my devices all registered to my AppleID), her computer and iPad here on this side of the house are bonging away. I can't hear myself think. There appears to be a feature where you can supposedly choose how each device is reached (Settings/Facetime/You Can Be Reached...), but it doesn't work. My wife's iPad only has her iPad email checked. And yet, when I double click on her iPhone email from my iMac Facetime, her iPad still rings.

It appears that the You Can Be Reached list applies across all devices using a single AppleID (and to which are linked a mobile phone number and potentially multiple email... each device we have has its own email). So if I remove (I think) the non-iPad email "Reached" line items, they'll disappear from her iPhone and iMac.

A similar process occurs for iMessage/text and to a lesser extent with email. And then there is the complexity other posters have noted about combining contact information under one Contact header (listing). I could design this and document functionality in a couple days. Apple should be able to as well.

Stumbled on this as this "feature" of single number reach caused some drama for us.

We were talking to my sister-in-law who lives in Brazil from my husband's iPhone to her iPhone at a party. As we were talking to her, her Apple ID started calling us! I asked her where her iPad was, and it was home with her kids and Nanny. I answered the call and got a kid in the back seat of a car. I couldn't see anything cuz it was dark, but could hear children talking. This kind of freaked us out. So I called her back from my iPhone while the connection was still open with the kid. The kid hung up but we got a couple calls back. When the call came to my phone, too, we really started to wonder what was going on and got a bit worried about her children's safety.

Then a father FT called us and asked why were we calling his son? We said he called us first - why is he using her Apple ID? He seemed too nervous to want to talk further and figure it out, and he hung up. I told her to change her Apple ID password. We tried to call back but they were not answering.

We realized that we still had an old prepaid phone number in our contacts from a recent trip she took to FL. When we called her (which we had done from both our phones) we called this young boy, too.

The easy answer to our problem is to delete that phone number. And I don't mind all my devices ringing as I can choose where to answer and we all have our own Apple IDs. My husband and I even have separate IDs for work and personal devices. But I can understand the frustration people are having, and think this really needs to be given as a choice. I would never have selected her FL phone to FT call as hers was not a SmartPhone at all.

At the risk of being digitally pummeled by people who just want things not to change, let me try and shed some light on why it was setup this way. The idea is you have one Apple ID to rule all your devices. Your Apple ID is the gateway to contacting you. You can then associate phone numbers and emails to that Apple ID as points of contact. So you have:

AppleID: example@icloud.com

Phone: 555-555-5555

Email: example@gmail.com

If someone Facetimes you, any device that has the Facetime app on it AND is asscociated with your Apple ID OR any service (Phone, Email) that you have linked to your Apple ID will try to deliever the Facetime call. The idea being, you don't have to Facetime Example's cell phone.. he's not there.. ok you hang up.. and try to Facetime his iPad.. he's not there.. ok you hang up.. and up and try to Facetime his Macbook.. and on and on. The more devices you get with Facetime available, the more painful it will be track down people. This is why we eliminated the house phone and have our work lines pointed at our cell phone. So people can call one number and get a hold of us, it's the same premise.

The power is in your hands, if you dont' want things to alert with Facetime there are numerous options, don't associate them with your Apple ID, create a seperate ID, create a seperate contact, turn off Facetime on that device, etc. The thought process behind this move was correct. Admitidly there are cirumstance when you want things seperate, then you just create a seperate Apple ID. You can't please everyone, so obviously Apple looked at what's going to work for the majority of people. And keeping with their ethos of making it simple, Facetiming one person and all those persons devices ringing makes good sense, the majority of people appreciate this feature, hence why this thread is 4 page and 40. There are plenty of things to rail about on the internet, and if this problem was INSOLVEABLE then yes rail away.

Hopfully this helps some people understand the decsion 🙂

I sincerely wish you read the previous posts before making your comment. One size fit all simply doesn't work in this case. Besides, this "one number" ideology has been floated in the industry for over 10 years. It's all good in theory, but there are a lot of user cases which don't fit into this ideology.

Whoa Tiger I read all four pages. It's you who is mistaken on this. In the 4 pages there are numerous different problems that require different responses, you're right there's no way anyone could address everyone at once. The point of a thread is to talk about similar issues. If your issue differs from the OP and you're looking for help, you need to start your own thread. My response was to explain why Apple chose to do it this way, which was the OP's question and question underlying the thread of the post.

But I had the option of all my devices ringing before ios7 the difference was I could change which devices rang, something I can no longer do.

@SET0TITAN, I'm with TigerA. Please read my post. I work for another large tech company so I sympathize with the Apple designers, but am unmoved in my opinion there is a better way that can be made accessible to all and not just the cognoscenti. Separately, I'm also disappointed in the documentation Apple [doesn't] provide for all reasonable use cases. When your text or calls are going somewhere you didn't expect, that is bad design.

The point of technology--and Apple--is not just to make simple, but to make the complex elegant. We are not wondering here about what was before the Big Bang (insoluble), we just want the ability to call the devices we want to call, and dictate what devices ring.

I can't really imagine why, but there's probably an issue in the data architecture or data center performance that probably drove Apple to take away functionality that existed in iOS6 (as I remember). Otherwise, I'd be really disappointed. (I used to work at Apple and loved it.)

If you read this far and think I'm writing dopey, consider a similar gripe about iMessage. Why is there no way for me to inquire if a phone or email is linked to an AppleID? Why do I care? Because I work with people all over the world and, if they have an iPhone, I can text them for free, but only assuredly free if I know their AppleID. So I have to always ask, because people's work email or phone number is not reliably their AppleID and I hate getting big mobile phone bills for sending a few hundred texts internationally I thought were going for free. A nice use case... no documentation (or functionality) provided. They don't even hint at data center replication times. Based on my testing, the Apple DC that services my text from California (probably RTP) apparently doesn't know about an AppleID in the U.K. until I force the learning by sending a First Text to the AppleID and the person replies. Then, eventually, the text become iMessages. But I'm just guessimating based on experience. Apple should tell me how it really works.

I have to respond to your iMessage experience, even though it seems off the topic a little -:(

I've had the exact same experience from only last week when I asked a person to enable iMessage on an iPhone in another country. The database was not updated (waited for hours) until I provided my id to the other party asking to send me an iMessage. Subsequently I can send iMessages to that iPhone.

The bottom line is that Apple should offer an option in FaceTime for either calling a particular id or all the ids in the contact. iOS 6 was perpect in this case (and in general as well) until comes iOS7. My cynical view is that someone may have overly justified their positions in Apple.

There are 3 icons on the right bottom corner of the FaceTime (if you use iPad). They are Favorites, Recents, & Contacts. If you select Contacts, the + sign will allow you to add new contacts.