You Can Now Deregister iMessage
Apple (via Josh Centers):You may need to turn off iMessage if you are now using a non-Apple phone and can’t get SMS or text messages someone sends you from an iPhone.
Update (2014-11-21): Jason Marr notes that deregistering does not fix the problem if people reply to old iMessage threads.
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Unfortnately, this section from the FAQ is a huge caveat:
"I'm still not getting texts from iPhones. Why?
In some cases, you might not get a message after you deregister iMessage if the person sending you a text is using an existing old conversation. Ask the person to start a new conversation to send you a message. To do so, they'll first need to swipe to the left to delete the existing conversation.”
If you have a long one-on-one iMessage history with someone that no longer uses iMessage, Apple is saying in some cases you may be to delete your entire conversation history with that person!
We actually ran into this with a group chat, because one of our friends switched to Android. She had already turned iMessage off on her phone before switching. But even if someone started a new Group MMS conversation, if someone had an old iMessage thread with the same people on it, iMessage would send their replies to the iMessage thread and not over SMS.
We were all in the same room one night and everyone deleted all related conversations on their phone. We then started a Group MMS and it worked fine that night. Unfortunately, a few days later, old iMessage conversations were being resurrected (maybe syncing from other devices like an iPad or Mac, we’re not sure) and we were back to having replies going only through iMessage.
FWIW, we’ve filed a detailed bug report, but aren’t too hopeful about it getting fixed.
