Apple Releases a Tool to Remotely Deregister iPhones from iMessage

Got rid of your iPhone and you’ve found you’re not receiving text messages from friends? No problem, as Apple quietly released a tool yesterday that makes solving the problem a lot easier.

Ever since Apple introduced iMessage in iOS 5, people have complained about text messages from other iPhone users not being delivered to their new non-Apple phones at all. The problem stemmed from the fact that those who didn’t remove iMessage from their old devices after getting rid of them, still had text messages from other iOS devices being routed to that phone. So even if their number was now registered to an Android phone, Apple’s servers still associated that number with an iMessage account, meaning texts would be sent to the iMessage server instead of the Android phone.

Early on in the history of iMessage, this problem didn’t only cause frustration, it also caused some rather big privacy concerns, after it was found that some users had their text messages routed to a new owner, or even worse, a thief.

The only way to fix this prior to now, was to go through the hassle of completely deregistering the iPhone from your Apple ID. This new system provides a handy webpage in which users only have to enter the phone number associated with iMessage to solve the problem. You’ll be sent a confirmation code to that phone number, with which you then enter on the site, making your worries about disappearing text messages a thing of the past.

Source: The Verge