Text Messaging Forwarding Problems between My iPhone, iPad, and Mac

One cool feature of iOS is Text Message Forwarding, which let’s you send and receive text messages from your iPhone on your other Apple devices. For me, that’s my iPad Air and MacBook Pro. Every so often I seem to do something that unknowingly turns off this feature. Once you begin to rely on it, it’s really annoying when you realize it isn’t working.

My guess, is it probably turns off when I am changing SIMs in my iPhone 6, which I tend to do when working on articles and answering questions here on smartphonematters. I can’t really get too mad that it turns off when I change SIMs I guess. What’s is annoying is that when even when I have my everyday SIM in the phone and try to turn it back on it doesn’t work.

You turn on text message forwarding on your iPhone in Settings > iMessage > Text Message Forwarding. It shows you a list of your other Apple devices which an on / off switch to enable / disable the feature. When you turn it on, a message displaying a code should pop up on that device. A dialog pops up on the iPhone and you need to enter that code to enable the feature.

The problem I had if that the code wasn’t popping up on my Mac or iPad. I have had this problem before, but forgot what I did to fix it. I finally remembered that turning iMessage off and on again on the iPhone seems to fix it.

I decided to share it here. Next time I have the problem, I can check smartphonematters for the solution.