It wasn’t until switching to WIND Mobile that I found out the devastating news. Apparently, associating Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime services on iOS with a phone number is not “officially supported” by the network. Initially scared, I wasn’t ready to give that up, but at the same time, would sticking with WIND for their super cheap plans be worth it knowing that? Instead of choosing between an affordable monthly rate for your iPhone and a fully functional phone, why not have both? Turns out you can.
How iMessage and FaceTime normally work
Typically, when activating iMessage or FaceTime, your iPhone will send an invisible SMS message to Apple’s servers, and upon receiving the appropriate response on your phone, the services are activated.
The issue with WIND
But on WIND, somewhere along the way, the message sent back is turned into the one that your iPhone won’t understand. The goal here is to translate the response message into one your iPhone will understand.
Navigating around the issue
After skimming over various parts of this Apple Support Communities thread, among other Google search results, I found a bit of a gem. This service claims to be the key translator involved in getting FaceTime and iMessage to work on your iPhone, and it delivers. The so-called “iMessage Activation” service also has help instructions of its own, but to make things a little easer, here’s what I did to get things up and running on my new iPhone 6:
- Install this profile: Visit this link on your iPhone, and follow the prompts to install the provisioning profile.
- Enable logging: Open the Settings app and go to Cellular → Telephony Logging, and then tap Enable Logging. (You won’t get any feedback, but that’s normal).
- Restart your iPhone: Hold the Sleep/Wake button and actually “slide to power off” as prompted. Then turn the device back on.
- Toggle iMessage on: Go to Settings → Messages and find the iMessage toggle. If it was already on, turn it off and back on again. If off, just turn it back on. It should say “Waiting for activation…” at this point. Leave it there for about two minutes.
- Save the log: After the two minutes from the previous step are up, go to Settings → Cellular → Telephony Logging and tap Save Log. (Again, not getting any feedback is normal.)
- Access the log on your computer: This is done by syncing to iTunes. When you sync, you’ll see iTunes say “Copying diagnostic information…” as one of the steps involved in syncing (as seen at the top). That means it’s working. If not, sync again.
Find the magic number: Search the log file by pressing ⌘+F or Ctrl+F, depending on whether you’re using Mac OS X or Windows. You want to find “GSM SMS Point to Point PDU (as hex str)” within the log. Here’s what it looks like:
Use the magic number: Copy the long magic number, and paste it into the box found on the iMessage Activator site. Then click Submit, and wait about one minute.
Check that iMessage is up and working: Go again on your iPhone to Settings → Messages, and if all goes well, you should see the “Waiting for activation…” message go away. Again, this could take up to one minute after completing the previous step.
Activate FaceTime: If you were able to successfully activate iMessage, FaceTime should be able to activate with your phone number as well. Just go to Settings → FaceTime, and toggle it off and then on.
To actually open the log file, go to:
OS X:
~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/[Your_Device_Name]/Baseband/
Windows 8, 7, and Vista:
C:\Users[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Log\CrashReporter\MobileDevice[Your_User_Name]\Baseband
The filename should be similar to “log-bb–2014–09–21–19–54–31-csi.txt” If there are multiple log files, choose the one with the most recent date and time.
That’s it!
A huge thanks goes out to the creator of the iMessage Activation service (donate if it works for you!), all those who participated in this discussion, which explains the issue in depth, and Apple for providing this support page. These things are what helped me create this simple guide.
