iPhone not receiving texts from some Android phones

For reasons, my wife recently had to switch from Android to Apple phones. This was the first Apple product I had ever bought, not counting a Macbook as a gift for our daughter. I never bought an IPod back in the day, and had never bought an iPhone until several weeks ago.

Immediately upon configuration, we noticed a problem, She was not receiving text messages from me. That was easy enough for me to fix by going into options on the text thread with her and forcing my phone to only send her SMS/MMS messages.

She was having the same issue with my mother, however her phone (Motorola G Play) does not have a configuration option to force SMS/MMS messages. Or if it does, I was unable to find it by reading the manual online, as my mom’s phone is 800 miles away. The issues persisted for a week or so until I finally worded a search in such a way to get the answer I needed.

I might also note I finally solved this issue while sitting on the beach in Puerto Rico. This is more evidence that I should move to the beach.

The difficulty is related to moving a phone number from Android to Apple. Her phone number was “registered” with Google Chat as an Android phone, so anybody she had ever done a Google Chat or Hangout with defaulted to sending her messages using Google’s proprietary answer to Apple’s iMessage. I overrode that behavior by forcing my phone to only send SMS/MMS to her. However, the way to solve the problem for all was for her to deregister her phone number with Google Chat. Once that was done, texts from my mom starting coming through normally.

Deregistering a phone number is easy. Simply use this form.

Of course, the real issue here is both Google and Apple using proprietary formats. That challenge is beyond my abilities to solve.