Last week, Apple released a new web tool that is going to help users who make the switch from their iPhones to a non-Apple device. The Apple web tool to deregister phone numbers from iMessage has been eagerly awaited by all former iPhone users who were experiencing problems with sending and receiving text messages to and from current iPhone users.
iMessage was launched by Apple at their developers’ conference in 2011. iMessage is currently supported in iOS 5 and later and OS X Mountain Lion and later. iMessage allows its users to send texts, but also documents, videos, photos and contact information. It uses Wi-Fi primarily and 3G or LTE secondarily. It resembles MMS and it is very popular with iPhone users.
iMessage has drawn plenty of criticism since its launch. The biggest flaw of iMessage is that, until now, you could not deregister your phone number from the service, if you changed your smartphone to a non-Apple device.
In other words, if you were to switch to an Android phone and your friends with iPhones would send you texts, you would not receive their messages. A lawsuit was filed against Apple over this issue and today it seems that Apple has finally done something about this stringent problem.
Apple has recently released the Apple web tool to deregister phone numbers from iMessage for the people who choose to make the switch to a non-Apple device. Users who were no longer using their iPhone would often have issues with sending or receiving SMS messages from another iPhone. They would be unable to send or receive the texts because their phone number was still registered to iMessage.
These issues have first surfaced in 2011, the year iMessage was launched. This May, a server glitch cause massive message delivery problems that caused Apple to get sued. It said that it was aware of the issue, but did not have any fix to provide at that moment. Now, Apple has launched the new web tool to deregister phone numbers from iMessage, which is going to fix the problem.
Jonathan Reynolds, former Apple client, had this to say about his experience with iMessage:
Apple is finally thinking about people who are switching from iPhones to something else and it took them a while to do it. I made the switch from Apple to Samsung earlier this year and I’ve experienced tons of problems with sending and receiving texts from some of my friends who were still using iMessage. I can’t believe it took Apple so long before they actually did something, when so many people were complaining about this issue. Apple blatantly refused to fix the issue until someone took initiative and sued them.
Indeed, Apple seemed to have ignored all the requests to fix the issue, simply shrugging their shoulders, but now that they have fixed it, users can finally deregister from iMessage.
If you want to use the new Apple web tool to deregister phone numbers from iMessage, then you should click on this link and follow the steps.
If you still have your iPhone, then it’s relatively easy to do deregister: you simply go to Settings/Messages/Turn iMessage off, but make sure you insert your SIM card, otherwise it won’t take effect.
If you no longer have your iPhone, then you should just enter the phone number you want to deregister from iMessage and they will send you a 6-digit confirmation code, which you then submit online.
The new Apple web tool to deregister phone numbers from iMessage has already proved very popular among former iPhone users. If you too have made the switch from Apple to another brand, make sure you deregister your phone number from iMessage, to fix any issues you might have or prevent them.