Speaking of failures… I finally got around to upgrading my phone to iOS 7. I was hesitant at first after various reports of it performing poorly on older phones like mine, but after a while those reports started sounding a little overblown, so I took the plunge and it worked pretty well.
Except iMessage. Which is kinda important since I’d rather not incur SMS charges for myself and the friends that use it. It remained stuck at this “Waiting for activation…” state seemingly forever, even after running through all of the official troubleshooting steps, resetting everything, waiting a full day, trying a bunch of anecdotal “well this worked for me…” tips from forums, etc.
After a week of fiddling with it a hundred different ways, I eventually figured I’d try using iMessage from my Mac just to see if it at least worked from there, and maybe isolate whether the problem was with the phone or the account. But, when it asked me which email address I wanted to use, it wouldn’t let me actually select one. It displayed my email address and put a checkbox beside it, but it would immediately clear the checkbox if I tried to set it, and I couldn’t proceed any further without it checked.
Confused as hell by this point, I logged into my Apple ID to check if there was anything wrong with it or set incorrectly, but it all seemed fine. I did notice that I didn’t have an alternate email address set though, so I thought I may as well set one while I was there. And then suddenly the Messages app would let me finish setting it up now that it had two email addresses to choose from, and going back to the phone, it activated iMessage within seconds.
Was it the setting of the alternate address that fixed it? Do you really need an alternate address for iMessage? Maybe just logging into the Apple ID account management cleared out some old crud from the database that was interfering? *shrug* It’s one of the few times where Apple stuff hasn’t “just worked” for me and I start wishing I could browse through their server-side trace logs…