Receiving iPhone text messages on BlackBerry devices after leaving iOS
I see a lot of posts here that reference people switching from iphones and then not being able to receive text from other iphone users. This is what I found when switching back and forth from my iphone to my Z10. One of the times I was using the iphone was when an ios update went live. Both my wife and myself updated and shortly after I went back to my Z. I did everything right (I thought) and turned imessage off on my iphone before I shut it off. Next day at work I texted my wife and she never answered so I texted her again. After a while she called me and asked what the heck I was doing because she had been answering me all along. Now I had never had this problem before when I switched, following the steps as earlier stated and was confused as to why I could not receive texts from her. What really confused me was another iphone friend of mine was texting me just fine.
What I found was it was not my phone as much as my phone number. Apple had my number as an imessage destination and was trying to deliver the text to that number. The reason for this was my wife's phone and how the settings were set up by default after the update. On an iphone, settings>messages you will find a switch that says "Send as SMS when imessage is unavailable. Carrier messaging rates may apply". If this switch is not turned on the sending phone will never send an SMS to a number previously associated with imessage. When this switch is turned on the phone will try to send imessage for a few seconds and then revert to SMS and send it through the carriers network as a normal text. After a couple of days the phone will realize that the number is no longer an imessage number and will just send SMS by default.
The long and short of this when switching to BlackBerry or any other non Apple platform from an iphone, have your iphone friends toggle that setting to "on" and the problem will disappear. You will also have to turn off imessage on your old phone because if it is turned on and you old phone is being used as an ipod, imessage will default to it and bypass your new/current phone.
It's a screwed up way too have to deal with it and it takes everyone involved to accomplish but it is what it is. To be honest an iphone user should have that setting turned on anyway. If the iphone user they are trying to contact is in a bad data area they wont get the message either until they are back in a good reception area, possibly to late to be of any good to them.
Anyway my 2 cents for what its worth and hopefully it will help some folks out and maybe even save some BB10 devices from the return bin.