Are your iMessage texts disappearing? The answer might just be checking your email
If you use both an Android phone and Apple devices, an Apple service usually irrelevant to your cross-platform life can quietly make a mess of your messages.
For people who stick to iPhones, iPads and Macs, Apple’s iMessage service offers numerous benefits: end-to-end encryption, fancy messaging effects and features, the ability to read and write messages from any of those devices, and those goofy “Memoji” avatars.
But if your mobile existence involves Google’s Android, iMessage can become a rogue air traffic controller, diverting messages from iPhone-using friends over to your iPad or Mac and away from your smartphone.
Weirder yet, I’ve seen an iPhone pal’s “tapbacks” – the likes, loves and laughs you can send with a tap – reach my phone but not their own words.
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Apple’s documentation doesn’t quite specify how iMessage routes your correspondence. The explanatory text in the Apple ID settings you can adjust on an iPhone, iPad, Mac or via the web gets more specific – as my iPad says, “These phone numbers and email addresses can be used to reach you with iMessage, FaceTime, Game Center, and more” – but that’s not right either.
iMessage: Why your email matters
As Apple PR explained, your email matters here. If you have that on your Apple ID and a sender starts a message by addressing it to that – which can happen if they type your name and have that address in their contacts list – it won’t reach your Android phone.
That can be easy to overlook, because Apple’s system looks and acts like a text-messaging replacement; on an iPhone, Messages is the texting app. But unlike such texting alternatives as WhatsApp or Signal, iMessage doesn’t require a phone number.
So if you use an Android phone and Apple devices, go into your Apple ID settings and remove any email you use for personal correspondence.
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The downside there is potentially complicating family video calls via Apple’s FaceTime – which, since you can’t install that app on your phone, seems an acceptable trade-off.
This isn’t the first time iMessage has gotten messy in cross-platform practice.
“Apple has had a lot of problems with routing iMessages in the past,” emailed Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor who has studied its security in depth.
How Apple could fix iMessage problem
Years ago, iMessage had a bad habit of ignoring somebody’s decision to replace an iPhone with an Android phone, causing messages to vanish down a bit bucket.
Apple could fix this by shipping a Messages app for Android, but has consistently opted not to, even as a paid service. Emails revealed in “Fortnite” developer Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple showed how Apple executives passed on that in 2013 and in 2016 to keep iMessage an Apple exclusive.
The security and features of iMessage may have won some iPhone purchases, but Android messaging is now catching up thanks to Google pushing an upgraded standard called RCS that adds many of the same tools and supports end-to-end encryption for person-to-person chats.
And now that the three major carriers have agreed to support RCS on their Android phones, Green noted that this will open up an encryption gap when iPhone and Android users chat – those texts will go out in the clear while others stay secure.
“It’s also worth pointing out that Apple still doesn’t support RCS, which is becoming the standard on Android,” Green wrote. “It’s something they should fix.”
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How to fix Apple iMessage problems for Android users with iPads
