Shouldn’t my iPhone (12 mini with updated iOS) automatically default to the mobile number for texting, instead of home’s landline number, from my Contacts? I do have labels assigned for each number. Or at least, tell me that the texting fail to send to this landline number?
Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
I’m not clear about the question.
SMS text messages are sent to phone numbers. So if they are being sent to your landline, then the senders have the wrong number.
iMessage is sent to your Apple ID, and every device logged in with your ID should get the messages.
Or is the problem that your outbound messages are send with a “from” address that is your land-line, causing replies (especially SMS replies) to be sent to the wrong number.
If it’s the third condition, go to Settings → Apps → Messages → Send & Receive. You will see the list of addresses and phone numbers that Messages will receive from, and you can pick the one that will appear as the source of messages that you send. Make sure the “Start New Conversations From” is either an e-mail address associated with your Apple ID or your mobile phone number.
Or, are you talking about sending to someone else’s home phone number? Your Contacts list actually ignores the tags - the “Mobile” tag is just text and doesn’t affect anything.
When sending messages to people with multiple contacts, you will notice, as you start typing, the list of destinations filter down to the one you want. After a few seconds, they addresses will change color from the default gray to blue or green. If it turns blue, then it will go out via iMessage. If it is green, then it will go out as SMS, but the app can’t tell if it’s a mobile number or a land-line.
If the contact has multiple addresses, there will be an arrow on the right-side of the column. Tap it to see them all, including the tags. But it will be up to you to know which of the green addresses can or can not receive SMS.
I think (hope) that iOS will remember your selection, in order to make it the default for future messages to that person, but I think that’s the extent of what it will be able to do.
Here’s my scenario: I have contacts that multiple numbers like mobile, landline at home, fax line, etc. When I send a new SMS message to a contact who has multiple numbers, my iPhone likes to pick the home landline number. Shouldn’t it be picking mobile number if it knows landline numbers can’t do texting? I was wondering why my contact didn’t get my texts because my iPhone sent it to the wrong number (a landline). Also, I wished the previous history told me which number I used. I noticed it when I deleted the old text history and started a new one, and saw Contact’s number was wrong (landline instead of mobile).
You are assuming that those tags you associate with phone numbers actually carry meaning. They don’t. They are strictly for human readability. You could tag a number “mobile” or “zysjdna”, and the phone would not behave any differently.
On iOS 26, the “Recents” tab in Classic view (or the “Calls” tab in Unified view) shows the tag associates with each recent call. But you’re right that if I tap the “Call History” from a contact’s page, it doesn’t. And Messages gives no indication.
This was better in prior versions of iOS, where tapping through from history to a contact would put an icon next to the specific phone number/e-mail address used for that history entry.
Yeah, newer versions keep getting worse. :(