I’ve been trying for weeks to get this repair man to come fix something and plans keep falling through, he says partly because he can’t send txts or get calls to ring or leave phone messages on my iPhone. However, it works when I call or send txts to him or leave phone messages to him at his cell. I keep getting friends to send me messages or try calling me every time he says this and it always works. My messages to him display green on my end, which I think means he is not using Apple servers. He’s not a blocked contact. My voicemail is not full. Otherwise I don’t know what is going on.
Could he be right? If so, how can I fix it? Or should I guess he is making excuses?
When you get hold of him, immediately send him a text, while on the phone, and have him reply. If it doesn’t come through, maybe there’s something going on.
There is a small possibility- if he just switched from an iphone to an android, he might need to go back to his old iphone and turn off imessage.
I switched a couple months ago and had problems texting with my sister, who has an iphone. It worked fine when I was texting people who had androids, but to my sister, messages would get lost or pop up days after they were sent. So I googled it, turned off imessage, and voila! Problem solved.
I don’t think it would account for calls, but it’s possible that the call aspect is BS and the text aspect has a grain of truth.
If he’s the only one who has a problem, then it’s probably something on his end. These kinds of things can be a hassle to try to figure out. If it was a friend then it might be worth it, but it’s probably going to be a lot of trouble to figure out what’s going with this random person’s phone. If you don’t feel like working with him to figure it out, get a Google Voice number in the meantime. If you haven’t used GV before, it’s like a regular phone number, but it’s handled by the GV website rather than a regular phone. He should be able to send text messages to that number. You can have GV forward calls your your cell and forward text and voicemail messages to your regular email. And having a GV number is useful in general when you need to give someone a phone number but don’t want to give them the number to your personal cell phone.
This is a problem for some people, but I don’t think it can explain this problem. Since @Napier’s messages display green, that means that his iPhone is not trying to send the messages via Apple messages. And it wouldn’t explain calls.
He finally came this morning and is doing a job now. Next time I go out there I will try sending and receiving txt with him and get him to phone me.
If it doesn’t work I’ll ask if he recently switched away from an iPhone.
If we don’t have anything better, I’ll suggest email. I have to admit I thought of that before and then forgot. I have a landline but never answer it, all the ringers are off.
As to Google Voice, I never heard of that before. If problems continue to mess us up, I will try that route.
I’ve had issues like that trying to text people who used to use Signal and have stopped. I understand there can be similar issues with Apple’s messaging system.
Some people have issues with getting text notifications from me, seems to be because I use the Signal app for texting and they’re using the standard app that comes with their phone.
More information, after we stood together yesterday trying things.
We can call each other and answer and talk on our phones.
We can send and receive and reply and receive with email on our phones.
I can txt him and he receives it. When he replies, or when he initiates a new txt conversation, on his phone it shows sent for a minute or two and then shows undelivered. On my phone I never see his txts.
He has an Android and has never had an iPhone. I’ve had iPhones since the iPhone 4 and currently have a 13 plus pro, the large one with close up camera. He uses Sprint (I think, hope I’m remembering right) and I’ve used Verizon for years. My software is all up to date.
There’s nobody else I’ve had communication problems with.
Is there anything unusual about your phone number? Is it in a strange area code? Was it ported to Verizon from a landline or another carrier? It could be that whatever database has the mapping between your phone number and the carrier is different in how Sprint is doing the lookup. Here’s a question similar to your situation:
For their problem, it looked to be an error with some incomplete data from an old port of the number from one system to another. If for some reason Sprint thinks your number is on the Sprint network, it might try to route it locally and fail.
Why? If GV forwards to my phone automatically then I get their calls/texts. If they end up being some psycho/stalker I could block them. Or are you saying you treat the GV # as a burner # & get rid of it, in which case anyone else you’ve given it to wouldn’t be able to contact you anymore, either?
You could use GV for anyone who you wouldn’t want to randomly be calling the phone in your pocket whenever they want. That might be sales people, realtors, Craigslist sellers, etc. It’s like having a 2nd tier number. Not exactly like a burner. You wouldn’t throw away the number. But you can turn off forwarding if you don’t need those people to ring through to your phone at the moment. So if you’re doing a remodel, you could give the contractor your GV number and have forwarding on to your phone. But otherwise you could just have forwarding to your email. GV has lots of flexibility so it can work differently depending on what you might need it for. It might be more like having a 2nd email address that you give out so that your primary doesn’t get lots of junk.
I think my phone number was ported to Verizon from Cellular One. It’s unusual in that it’s the 302 area code for Delaware, but I’ve only had it living in Maryland (when I got it in the 1980s, cell phones weren’t being sold in my part of the state yet). I think I made the switch to Verizon about 20 or 25 years ago. Could the kind of problem you’re describing come from so long ago a switch?