How to Detach a Phone Number from iMessage if You’re Switching Away from iPhone
If you have ever switched from an iPhone to an Android or Windows phone, either temporarily, out of necessity, or for testing purposes, you may have noticed that a new phone will sometimes not receive inbound messages that have been sent from other iPhone users. Well, you probably didn’t notice it because you didn’t get any of the messages, but someone probably told you that they sent you a text and you never received it. These disappeared messages are almost always due to a quirk of iMessage, which seems to strongly couple itself to a phone number that belongs to an iPhone, and if not disabled or deregistered, that iMessage attachment can end up hoarding the messages in some sort of ethereal messaging purgatory, which then prevents them from being delivered to the new non-Apple phone. Fear not though, because you can get a phone number out of iMessage Purgatory by using one of two different methods outlined below.