Dec 17, 2013

Re-associating a phone number with iMessage

The other day my wife's iPhone suddenly stopped being able to receive iMessages. Whether from iPhone or Messages.app, sending a message to her phone number resulted in a red exclamation point with the option to resend as a text message.  Further, her messages to me came across as being from her email address (Apple ID) instead of her number, so they showed up as being from a variant of her name and in a different message thread.  It was as if her phone number was suddenly disassociated from iMessage.  Strange.

Rebooting didn't work.  Deleting and re-adding the iCloud account from her phone also didn't work.  What ultimately *did* work part way into our date night (and possibly thereby saving said night) was going into the settings for Messages on her phone and turning off the Messages feature.  Upon turning it back on, iOS said it was "Activating" Messages and displayed the spinning gear for about 45 seconds.  After that, everything was back to normal and she could once again send and receive iMessages normally.


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