Text Message Forwarding Multiple Device? MacBook Air is fine, Mac Mini is Not.

Understood. Maybe if I know what key need to delete earlier, your method will wok with me 🙂

Yes, It was in my original post in two places.

• This is the entry to look for in Keychain Access "com.apple.ids: localdevice-AuthToken” delete all entries with that listed. But not yet…

• Now, delete the entries in keychain in both user accounts, test and your normal user account(s)

Oops, it seems to me that I miss this... 😀 thanks anyway!

I have been struggling with this for months, ever since I got a new iMac, migrated my old MacBook over to it, but kept on using the MacBook whenever I needed a laptop. Creating a new UUID and removing the ids keychain items from the MacBook seemed to do the trick for me. This was such a baffling issue, but when I read that creating a new UUID seemed to fix it that made perfect sense to me. Who knows, there may be other things that weren't quite working right because of there being two identical users on my iCloud account that are now fixed, too.

So I too had this issue. I have not yet tried either of the two things suggested in this thread ... But, I wanted to take some time to report my findings.

I have two MBP retinas, one with device name of "Rich MBP" ... the other named "Rich WORK MBP".

I removed these Plist files (on both Macs), (from reading a few related posts):

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ids.service.com.apple.madrid.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.imessage.bag.plist

Logged out of Messages and back in again (on both mbp's) in order for the plist files to get regenerated.

Things **seemed** to work at first. At this point, MY IPHONE STARTED KEEPING TWO DEVICES LISTED under the messages sms forwarding devices list !! Yeah! (before it would only hold one).

So ... I continued, ... I finished getting handoff / continuity working on the first mac and the device displayed correctly on my iPhone: ("Rich MBP") .

Started working on the second mac for continuity, got things working there … BUT THEN >>> THE FIRST MAC BROKE !!!! Now my iPhone reports two entries for the second mac:

"Rich WORK MBP"

"Rich WORK MBP"

Basically the first entry changed from the correct device name of "Rich MBP" to "Rich WORK MBP" ...

Toggleing the second entry to the ON position (from my iPhone) will cause the numeric code to pop up on the work mbp.

but the first entry will neither, (a) flip back to the correct name, nor cause a code to pop up on either mac.

Here's the kicker.

I open up the file:

com.apple.ids.service.com.apple.madrid.plist to take a look at it.

The first mac is missing an entry for "UniqueID", (yep the generated file is missing that entry) the second mac, that works, had an entry for it with a "UniqueID"

BTW … it's not the same number as the UUID for the administrator account from the second solution in this thread.

So for me, the delete keychain method did not ultimately fix things .. well, kind of I guess ...

Now, text messaging forwarding seems to work, (and I have a UniqueID now in that file) ... but, handoff is still broken really ..

And I now have two entries for each mac showing up on the iPhone ...

UPDATE:

All is working well from the first solution. I guess I just needed to wait for the iCloud to pass my keychain around a bit. I use Apple 2-Step Authentication ... so logging into FaceTime on MBPs does not take your regular AppleID ... it requires an app-specific password. Immediate attempts did not allow me to even login on one machine ... timed out trying to take the app-specific password ... I rebooted, but eventually it did take it.

Continuity works fine now, between all three devices:

Mac A -> Mac B and iPhone

Mac B -> Mac A and iPhone

iPhone -> Mac A and Mac B

I still have double entries listed on my iPhone Settings->Messages-> Text_Message_Forwarding (2 Devices):

Rich WORK MBP (Mac)

Rich MBP (Mac)

Rich MBP (2) (Mac)

Rich WORK MBP (2) (Mac)

The first two seem legitimate and handshake with the key given to pair ... the last two do not pop up any key from either machine. I do wish I could figure out how to remove those from the list.

Ideas? It's mentally annoying ... but all is working for now.

Richiwalt wrote:

UPDATE:

All is working well from the first solution. I guess I just needed to wait for the iCloud to pass my keychain around a bit. I use Apple 2-Step Authentication ... so logging into FaceTime on MBPs does not take your regular AppleID ... it requires an app-specific password. Immediate attempts did not allow me to even login on one machine ... timed out trying to take the app-specific password ... I rebooted, but eventually it did take it.

Continuity works fine now, between all three devices:

Mac A -> Mac B and iPhone

Mac B -> Mac A and iPhone

iPhone -> Mac A and Mac B

I still have double entries listed on my iPhone Settings->Messages-> Text_Message_Forwarding (2 Devices):

Rich WORK MBP (Mac)

Rich MBP (Mac)

Rich MBP (2) (Mac)

Rich WORK MBP (2) (Mac)

The first two seem legitimate and handshake with the key given to pair ... the last two do not pop up any key from either machine. I do wish I could figure out how to remove those from the list.

Ideas? It's mentally annoying ... but all is working for now.

Can an you specify what you did exactly? I used migration assistant to transfer data from my iMac to my new rMBP. I'm only able to forward messages to one computer at a time and TFA is really annoying in this situatio.

Sure ... read exactly what I did here. I posted it to my blog for myself.

Let me know if this helps. Take your time,

good luck,

richard

Richiwalt wrote:

Sure ... read exactly what I did here. I posted it to my blog for myself.

Let me know if this helps. Take your time,

good luck,

richard

Just to clarify, you need to do step two on both computers correc?

Richiwalt wrote:

Sure ... read exactly what I did here. I posted it to my blog for myself.

Let me know if this helps. Take your time,

good luck,

richard

OK I followed all of your steps and can see both of my computers on my iphone but when I try and toggle them on in messages.app nothing happens. Does

Kotulcn,

You did make system files visible before deleting those two files, right ?

( Please forgive any spelling errors ... This email was sent from a mobile device. )

mbentley wrote:

Well that file didn't do it. I'm going to keep trying different plist files until I can hopefully find the right one.

I'm not positive but I seem to have gotten everything working by doing a hard restart on my iPhone then turning iMessage on with my phone number as default sent from ID. Once I did that I was able to toggle text forwarding on and then changing sent from to my emai. Thank you!!

Richiwalt wrote:

Sure ... read exactly what I did here. I posted it to my blog for myself.

Let me know if this helps. Take your time,

good luck,

richard

This is great. Thanks so much. For what it's worth, I was able to do it in even fewer steps and (likely) with considerably less hassle:

• Log out of your AppleID only in Messages and FaceTime on all devices.
• On all Macs, open KeyChain; Search for localDevice. Delete all com.apple.ids: local device-AuthToken keys.
• Navigate to the hidden folder: ~/Library/Preferences. Delete these two plist files:
  • com.apple.ids.service.com.apple.madrid.plist
  • com.apple.imessage.bag.plist
• Restart all devices and log back into Messages and FaceTime.

I did not need to log out of iCloud on any device. It's the hugest pain because of all the "do you want to save this, delete this or play a game of chess, Dr. Falken?" nuclear panic options that appear to come with the act of logging out of iCloud. I also did not need to reset my iCloud password.

Super awesome, bud — thanks for figuring it out!

Absolutely perfect !! FINALLY. Ty