So you had an iPhone and now it’s gone–broken, lost, sold, history. Coincidentally around the same time you activate your new non-Apple phone, you notice your iPhone-wielding friends have lost total interest in talking to you. It’s not their fault–it’s Apple’s.

You see, you didn’t realize you were never texting these people in the traditional sense: You were iMessaging them. And now that you’ve left the Apple ecosystem, the chain of communication has been broken, and you can’t seem to figure out how to fix it.

That’s because iMessage is different than texting in one major way–it doesn’t actually send its message over the same SMS infrastructure that texting does. Instead, iMessage is more like Gchat–it works over your 3G/4G connection–and it hijacks your text messages before they go out over traditional SMS. When you get your new iPhone and start texting, you notice that with Apple-owning friends your messages appear in blue. That’s how you know you’re iMessaging. When service is bad, or you talk to an Android or dumbphone user, you’ll notice your message bubbles revert back to Green–normal text messages.

Here’s the problem: When you stop using your iPhone, iMessages continue to be delivered over iMessage–they don’t revert to SMS automatically, just because your iPhone is off, broken or deactivated.

This has been a problem since at least a year ago, and searching the web will net you any number of hapless iPhone owners on messageboards far and wide, trying to figure out where their messages are going.

One solution is to delete the old device via your Apple support profile. But for most people who have their Mac nearby, there’s a quicker solution: Open the Messages app in OS X, find the account settings, and uncheck your phone number from the active handles on your account.

If you don’t open Messages often, doing so will result in a cascade of missing texts–these are messages that haven’t been getting delivered to your non-iPhone, but have ended up on your iMessage-enabled Mac, otherwise the last place you’d go to receive a text. Now the lightbulb should go off. Perhaps you get a little pissed. Apple is punishing you for ditching your iPhone by cutting you off from your friends, and they want to make it feel like you need to be on an Apple device to talk to the people you care about.