Questions from a New iPhone User who Uses Android as a Primary Device

By Lanie Carmelo, 6 December, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi all. I just got my first iPhone a few days ago for my birthday. After checking it out, I decided to stick with my Android phone as my primary device but use the iPhone as a secondary device on Wi-Fi for games and other things. There's no SIM card in the phone, and I changed the number associated with my Apple ID to a Google Voice number to keep replies to messages I send from my Android phone from being received on the iPhone, which was a problem at first.
I almost have things set up, but I'm having a small problem here. I play Swordy Quest and love it so far. I didn't have any friends in Game Center at first, so I asked for people to friend me on there so I could have a clan in Swordy Quest. Someone just gave me their email so I could send them a friend request, but iMessage doesn't seem to be working. It says I need to enable MMS messages.
Can anyone help me fix this so I can send messages with iMessage, and messages on my Android phone, without replies going to the wrong places, or is there another way to send Game Center friend requests? Thanks.

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Comments

By Holger Fiallo on Monday, December 6, 2021 - 22:19

iMessage works only iPhone. Go to setting, message and turn the appropriate setting in message.

By Lanie Carmelo on Monday, December 6, 2021 - 22:22

I'm aware of that. I just want to be able to text from my Android phone and have replies come back to that phone, even if the other person uses iMessage. That doesn't happen if I link the phone number for my Android phone to my Apple ID.

By Rixon Smith on Monday, December 6, 2021 - 22:46

The way I understand things is this. The iMessage feature is strictly between Apple products only I hope this helps you

Again, I'm aware of this, but yesterday, when I had my Android phone's number registered to my Apple ID, I texted an iMessage user from my Android phone, and when they replied, it went to my iPhone.

You will probably need to turn the iMessage feature completely off in order for this to work. If that does not work I don’t know what to tell you.

By Daniel Angus MacDonald on Monday, December 6, 2021 - 23:15

to turn on MMS messages on iOS, go to settings>messages>MMS messages. it should work. sending text messages to android from iOS and vice versa, was fix years ago.

By Holy Diver on Tuesday, December 7, 2021 - 11:41

I, like you, use android on my primary phone and have an iPhone for games, braille and such. If the secondary phone does not have an active sim card and it has iMessages enabled other apple users will see texts from that device as coming from the email address associated with your apple ID. It will show up in their messages app like a normal text but will show as coming from the email on your apple ID, not your phone number....which can totally confuse people when they have two text threads with you but it works for game center purposes. I think you have to toggle the Imessages off and on again so it routes texts from apple folks to your phone but once iMessages knows it's no longer linked to your phone number everything works.

By Lanie Carmelo on Tuesday, December 7, 2021 - 11:52

Update on this weird situation. I can send iMessages to phone numbers but not email addresses. When I try to send to an email address it says the message can't be sent and tells me to enable MMS. I have it set to send and receive with the email associated with my Apple ID, so I don't understand this.

By Holy Diver on Tuesday, December 7, 2021 - 12:01

I'm pretty sure this is a feature of iMessages but I never tried to send an iMessage to just an email address back when I daily drove an iPhone, recipients were always in my contact list which meant I always had a phone number and I have a hard time seeing a company like Apple leaving open that kind of potential security hole ...but that's just me speculating.