For all I knew, when I plugged the SIM to the secondary phone I just accepted my number to be associated with the company iCloud account (spoiler: wrong reason). I was in a hurry and just tapped yes to every incoming popup without bothering to read it (hell, I’m a iOS developer, I know what I’m doing! Ha).

I found nothing of help online.

I called Apple support. A super nice lady walked me through some settings change and all, but basically she was clueless as to how to resolve the situation. I tried messaging my wife again and when she replied, it still appeared everywhere. In my personal phone AND all those company devices.

So went the most of my afternoon.

Here’s what happened

I didn’t have money in my SIM card. It’s an auto-up contract, so basically it always sits at 0.05€ pretty much all the time until a payment is due. Everything is unlimited in my contract. But not iMessage activations. They’re a separate thing. They apparently don’t use neither data nor SMS to configure.

When I put my SIM in the secondary (company) iPhone, it tried activating iMessage on the phone number but couldn’t.

When I wrote my wife, my messages went out from my company’s iCloud account, not my number as I thought. My wife didn’t worry about it (it appeared in the header, but little did she know that it was worth mentioning), I didn’t either (because on my side this was invisible, save for the blue bubble — no sender address whatsoever).

When I put the SIM back to my phone, it couldn’t reactivate iMessage on my number: the setting kept spinning in circles. I thought it mattered, but it didn’t. Nobody could actually iMessage me using my phone number (because it wasn’t active).

What I learned