We have a famiily all with iPhones and one is in England now and we are trying to communicate with iMessage but even when he has wifi, while ours are "blue" going to him, he says his are "green" coming to us and thus is getting the text message rate which is ridiculously expensive overseas.
iPhone 5s, iOS 8
Yes - we have done that as well as all of the obvious stuff we could think of like rebooting the phone, toggling iMessage on and off, trying the international switch in both positions, turning cellular data on and off and cellular roaming on and off; it doesn't work currently even when he is connected to wifi. Not to say there isn't other obvious stuff that we haven't thought of but tried all of the stuff on the Apple support page about iMessage. It worked fine when he and we were in the US and our stuff goes to him "blue" but what he tries to send back appears "green".
Yes - we have done that as well as all of the obvious stuff we could think of like rebooting the phone, toggling iMessage on and off, trying the international switch in both positions, turning cellular data on and off and cellular roaming on and off; it doesn't work currently even when he is connected to wifi. Not to say there isn't other obvious stuff that we haven't thought of but tried all of the stuff on the Apple support page about iMessage. It worked fine when he and we were in the US and our stuff goes to him "blue" but what he tries to send back appears "green".
He needs to go to Settings>Messages and ensure that iMessage is activated on his device.
I'm guessing, since you did not indicate, that his iMessage is active. I say that also because you say your messages to him are in a blue bubble. He is getting the messages? I'm not sure what International switch you are referring to, so I cannot address that. What happens if he turns Send as SMS switch. Do his messages to you completely fail? I cannot think of a reason, since iMessage is data, that it would not go through when he is on Wi-Fi. Is he using his SIM from the US, or a local SIM in the UK?
We have not tried turning the send as text message switch off yet but we could try that (SMS). We have Verizon and they subcontract with several UK providers so that your phone chooses the strongest signal and is able to use that - they have O2 and Vodaphone among others and that part seems to be working and right now he is in London where there is a hugh abundance of towers and signals. The messages don't completely fail - his to us get sent as text rather than iMessages which will then drive a significantly different data charge. There is a switch under Setting/cellular/roaming called international cdma which says to turn it off if you experience poor data or message performance. That significantly helped in getting his phone to get a signal and the verizon folks did some troubleshooting live with us on a conference call which was very helpful but this part still is not functioning like it should. He has not yet updated to iOS 9 yet and that may fix something as well if it is an operating system glitch.
I don't really think it is an operating system glitch, and if he doesn't have a computer there in case of a problem with the update, I suggest he wait on that.
That international switch must be something unique to Verizon, as I do not see that on my AT&T phone, and it refers to CDMA. That SMS switch in Messages settings is just for iMessage. If an iMessage cannot go through, then it would automatically switch to SMS, and incur any SMS charges. Since he is on Wi-Fi, that should be handling his iMessage send and receive, however the activation of iMessage is dependent on an international SMS. If you turned it off and then turned it back on again, I wonder if it activated completely. Does he have the opportunity to iMessage someone in the UK to test? If he turns off the SMS switch in Settings, and then restarts the phone, if he tries to send you something and it goes by SMS, then for some reason his phone is not recognizing your number as an iMessage number. The only other thing I could think of is to turn iMessage off, then go to Settings>General>Reset>Reset Network Settings. That would clear network settings, including Wi-Fi. He would need the passcodes for any Wi-Fi that he wants to join, and have to join them over, but it is supposed to clear any network glitches that may be occurring. Other than that, I cannot think of anything else.
That was our last thought as well was to reset the network settings but we wanted to try the other steps first to see if any of them started things working as we didn't want to lose all of the network settings without needing to. I haven't been in contact with him the last day so I don't know what parts of the things we are in the midst of trying he has gotten through. Will let you know when we get to try some of the above. Ron
iMessage not working between phone in US and England
