There are a multitude of reasons why a user would get a message send failure from iPhone to Android. The two platforms use SMS as a fallback to send texts, but sometimes this fails, leaving users stumped. We’ll break down some of the reasons a message send failure may occur when trying to message Android with iOS and some potential fixes.
Why do messages fail to send from iPhone to Android?
A message failing to send from iPhone to Android is almost always caused by iMessage. Apple hasn’t released an Android version of iMessage, so if an iPhone sends a text using that protocol to an Android phone, it’ll either never arrive or fail to send entirely.
Most of the time, an iPhone can automatically detect whether a message recipient is using an Android phone or not. When it does, it’ll send a text as an SMS (or MMS if it contains media). However, an issue can occur when a user switches from an iPhone to Android but keeps the same number. If a user doesn’t deactivate iMessage on their old device, messages may fail to send from iPhone to Android. This is because the iPhone may be trying to send the text as an iMessage instead of an SMS because the Apple servers still have the number registered.
The easiest fix for the above issue is deactivating iMessage and logging out of the iPhone entirely when switching to Android. This should deregister the number, and iPhones should send texts as SMS as usual.
A new type of messaging incompatibility may also occur. Several Android messaging apps now use the RCS protocol instead of SMS, including Google Messages. If for some reason these apps couldn’t fall back to SMS, an iPhone message may fail to send because Apple doesn’t currently support RCS. For example, suppose an Android user completely turns off the ability to receive SMS messages. In that case, they simply won’t be able to get texts from iPhone users.
