Being a rotten apple
Recently, I have been noticing that when apple users send an MMS (group message), I will sporadically not receive it. This posed some social hazards, because you don’t want to be that one person who doesn’t reply, and gets categorized as an ignorer of messages.
I started digging further, and found that the problem seemed to happen with users of newer iPhones. Others with iphones on the same message thread could reply-all, and I would get it.
On further Google-research, I realized that this was Apple punishing people for leaving iOS. I sold my iPhone 2 years ago. Being a tech aware person, I deregistered the phone from everything I could, wiped all data, and reset to factory settings. Somehow this was not enough.
With iOS7, Apple turned off default SMS when iMessage wasn’t available. Something else must also have happened, but suddenly folks like me who once used to have iPhones, could no longer receive MMS (pictures or group msgs) from apple users.
Various discussion groups have hassled over this. The long and short of it was that the messages were going to your old and dead iMessage account associated with the same phone number. If you are in this boat, here are two guidelines. The official apple answer (created after threat of a class action suit) is this:
https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage
In my case, it said there was no such number to deregister. So, I also utilized the second “grandma’s remedy” option: Log on to your apple account (appleid.apple.com). Change password (this logs you out of imessage). Remove your phone number from the account if it is there. Save. Add phone number back in if you want to.
I have, since this morning, been able to receive group texts again. Lets hope it continues working. I love Apple products, but I hate their narcissistic attitude towards their devices. We can, and do, defect to other operating systems. Its called free will. SMS, thankfully, can not get controlled by Apple’s free will. (Legally, at least.)