iPhone Handoff

I wonder if carriers can use phone switching as an excuse to put sanctions on your contract/account. I’m sure they have some dumb “reasonable” clause, which they might define as “switching a device once or wince a year”.

*twice

Here's something that most US users and probably even many devs at Apple are not aware of:

For over 25 years, it's been possible to have more than one SIM card with the same phone number in Germany. o2 was the first to offer this, but others followed.

Which means: I have currently 4 phones (3 iPhones, one Android) that all have the same number. I can make calls from any of them, and if someone calls, all can ring (I can configure this thru my phone provider). Text messages won't allow this - but I can still choose and quickly switch which phone (i.e. SIM) shall get the messages. And with the "forward text messages" feature in iOS, as long as the iPhone receives the msg, it can forward it to the other iOS devs and even to my Macs.

HOWEVER: Apple in the US doesn't handle this well. The problem is that iMessage and Facetime get confused if more than one device wants to handle the msgs for a phone number. It leads to the problem that I can activate it on one iPhone, but then the others show an endless progress icon for the activation of Facetime and iMsg, and I keep getting prompted on all other devices whether I want to add the phone number (and it's not clear if it means to add it to the devive where I'm prompted at, or globally for my entire account). Sometimes I get prompted 10 times a day or more.

It's a huge pain. Apple DE support is aware of it and tries to help - and they require me to not only reset my network settings (which makes me lose all my stored Wifi pws) but also wants me to clear all my VPNs - which is a huge pain as I have several, and they're difficult to re-import (and there's no easy way to export/save them).

But usually, after a few weeks, it all works. Never know what made it work.

I can only hope that with the new changes, this will work better. But I don't count on it. So far, I have installed iOS 27 on two iPhones and still have the same trouble activating iMsg and Facetime on them for my phone number.

This kind of makes sense for the reasons @Thomas mentions in that Apple puts another layer over the phone number and so it's better if Apple handles that entire layer.

Nothing else about this makes sense beyond a few obvious reasons that seem ridiculous to me. I have yet to have anyone name a single case where this would really be useful beyond testing the iPhone Duo. Much less any reason for the network operators to charge for it other than greed. Literally greed, this should be invisible to them since Apple is handling it at their layer.

There doesn't even seem to be a security issue here, nor a billing one. It's still one device at a time, enforced at the OS layer. On the same Apple ID. All it's doing is switching activation between two devices rapidly, which have already been pre-authenticated.

I welcome someone with more technical knowledge and insight about this than me to enlighten me.

In addition to needing two iPhones running iOS 27, “iPhone Handoff” will seemingly require carrier support.

Sounds like this feature won’t be free to implement.

Certainly, phone companies will nickel-and-dime their customers for whatever the market will bear. Remember how SMS was text stuffed in some unused space in cell packets, but they charged 10¢ per message to send them?

As for iPhone Handoff support, call me a commie simp, but I’m quite satisfied that a feature used only by a tiny fraction of people who are richer than I am fund its implementation and upkeep, and not the other 99.995%.

> Sounds like this feature won’t be free to implement.

I think it is; it's just that it competes with what telcos already offer, so it can't be free.

The feature I want is already here, and free, but Apple sabotaged it. It's called "Calls on Other Devices", and it works between Mac and iPad as the caller and iPhone as the proxy; Apple saw to it that two iPhones couldn't use it to make calls, only to receive them. I asked Apple support about this and they gave me some guff about iPhones having SIM slots so of course you can't use them to call through another iPhone, even when there's no SIM or ESIM installed. Ridiculous. And of course, as already said here, it's not like ESIM transfer is difficult, for those occasions where you'd like your other/older/backup iPhone to own your number, which can usually also directly be arranged with the carrier / through their app. This is just Apple doing what it does best, catering to niche affluent audiences who want a tiny glimpse of the future, with the help of carriers for maximum cost and at the expense of normies. See also Apple Watch requiring a paired account with your iPhone, even though absolutely nothing requires this but receiving calls, which I never do on my watch, and if I did, FaceTime audio over a low-volume MVNO data plan would be far superior. Apple just like being the cleverest people in the room and we all pay the price for it.

For people asking who this is for, I know exactly who.

Until recently, I worked for a government facility that required personal phones to have their cameras drilled out if they were to be allowed inside. When I had an older iPhone and didn’t take much pictures, this was fine, but when I upgraded I didn’t feel like destroying my new phone and thus made use of a cellular Apple Watch and left my phone at home.

iPhone Handoff is for people in these situations. And there might be more than you realize.