Detangling yourself from the Apple ecosystem is incredibly messy if you have contacts who still use iPhones.
I got a Pixel 2. Three years of OS updates, purchased at launch...I might still be using the phone when support dries up, but I might not be. I figured it was plenty good enough. I got the smaller one because several Pixel 2 XL reviews were somewhat unflattering towards the POLED displays, and because it's the same size as my iPhone 6S Plus, which is kind of big for me. Anyway, bezels be damned, I got a Google phone - the Apple equivalent's bezels are just as big.
Anyway, yesterday I got the phone. It has a new Verizon SIM in it. Steps to activate:
* Turn off Find My iPhone on the old phone
* Turn off iMessage and Facetime on the old phone
* Turn off the old phone
* Turn on the new phone and activate
Easy-peasy, right? I thought so, until my wife texted me a couple times yesterday afternoon and I didn't get them. On her iPhone 7 Plus, they were sending as iMessage still. I went to Apple's
Dregister and Turn Off iMessage page and re-traced my steps. I also went through the trouble of resetting the iPhone and then deregistering as if I didn't have it. That page said
it's not registered. Great. We waited around 6 hours, and then last night I called Apple support.
The dingdong I talked to said that since I have another Apple device (the Mac I use for work) I have to use iMessage with my Apple-owning friends. I said that's great, where can I download iMessage for Android? So I hung up on that person and waited overnight.
This morning it was still borked so I called Apple again. Got a different person and he put me on a series of 3-5-minute holds. After the second one, their system texted me a message with a code and I read it back to him. He says that within 12 hours, their back-end messaging platform should treat my number correctly. So we'll see. Waiting for tonight, I guess.