I can easily send SMS texts from my Mac. My nearby iPhone does the actual task, but I simply type it in the Messages App. Equally well I can receive such SMS.
A friend of mine can’t and we can’t find out why, we’ve been through all the settings we can think of, but no luck. Especially Settings>Messages>Text Message Forwarding is ON.
We’re both on Ventura 13.6,
I’m on iOS 15.7.9, he is on iOS 16.
Anybody with ideas, please?
On his Mac, does he have Messages>Settings>iMessage>Enable Messages in iCloud turned on?
Can your friend send and receive iMessages? If not, that would be the first problem I would try to solve.
If iMessages are working ok, I think for him what I would try first is turning off iMessage on the iPhone, then turn it back on again, then toggle off and on the Send as SMS setting for the Mac (on the iPhone settings, of course.)
And if that doesn’t help - as much as a pain this can be, I wonder about signing out of the iCloud account on the iPhone (Settings / Apple ID, scroll to the bottom), sign back in again, re-activate iMessage, and then re-activate the Send as SMS, if it is not already.
yes, this is probably what needs to be done. I went through this helping a friend a few months ago, and logging out and back in to iCloud on both mobile and Mac was the winning solution (I think there was rebooting of the phone and Mac too).
The devices need to be on the same wifi network for it to work.
@aforkosh Yes he has. He lives far away, but I had a look myself with Anydesk (remote screen sharing) and saw this myself.
One notable diff between my and his settings is: Below my Messages>Settings>iMessage>Enable Messages I see
"You can be reached for messages at:
and both are ticked.
But for him there is ONLY his email address
@ddmiller iMessages work fine (don’t forget that for iMessages we don’t need a nearby iPhone) I will follow your suggestions of toggling and sign in/out.
@theconsultant Both devices are on the same network.
@seth We did a restart of the Mac, no joy, but see above my answer to @ddmiller
If his mobile number is not listed, Text Message Forwarding is not active. If it is on, turn it off, and then back on again. I have seen this work in the past.
Many thanks for all the advice. We solved it on the iPhone by going to
Messages>Settings>iMessage>Send & Receive
and by activating his mobile number which had no tick mark.
No instant success, though, after 10 mins we still saw a circling icon instead of the expected tick mark. One iPhone-restart later we found the tick mark correctly set on the iPhone and we could also set the tick mark for the mob number in Messages on the MAC. After that all was working as expected.
Thanks again.