Q: iMessage won't failover to SMS
Strange problem with my wife's iPhone. She has a pay-as-you-go phone, no data plan, only uses wi-fi.
This always worked fine before, but now when she sends a message to my iPhone or other people's iPhones, it goes by iMessage, but if she is not on wi-fi, it just hangs there for a long time until it comes back with a "failed to send" error. Failover to SMS is enabled, but it never fails over. In the past, it tried for a minute or so before failing over to SMS text, but now it won't failover at all unless she manually selects the message and changes it to send as SMS. This is a real pain as she is not very up with technology and hates having to remember to do this when she is not on wi-fi at home. If she forgets I never get the message. This used to just work fine. It did, then one day it just stopped working.
I could be wrong about this, but it seemed to start acting this way when we went to the US on a trip and then came back home to Canada.
I've tried these things:
Disable/Enable SMS failover
Disable/Enable iMessage again
Reset Network settings
Factory reset phone and restore to backup
Nothing has worked and getting very frustrated. Apple Store and her provider (Telus) both just shrugged their shoulders and said to turn off iMessage, but her plan doesn't have many texts so we don't want to do that, and this seemed to work fine before so something is wrong.
Posted on Sep 9, 2016 5:35 AM