My wife and I upgraded to iPhone 13’s from iPhone 8’s about six months ago. My wife sold her phone at either a Kroger’s or an HEB don’t remember which. I hung onto mine. We also have a landline that’s been with us for close to 50 years. Anyway last month’s landline bill came in and it was something like $78/mo for a plain Jane phone. No caller ID, no call waiting, no call notes, nothing just a plain old phone. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I had heard of “porting” where you can keep your phone number but go to a different service. Anyway I successfully ported our old phone number to a new service and that’s where I used my old iPhone 8. Anyway in setting up the iPhone 8 I thought it would be nice to have all my contacts on the old phone and that way we would basically have caller ID. I was successful in moving all my contacts to the new/old landline number.
Here’s my problem. For some reason when I send myself a text (for a reminder or whatever) the text not only shows up on my iPhone 13 but also on the iPhone 8. I really don’t want that happening. How do I get it to stop? I have a feeling it has something to do with “syncing” but I’m not sure.
I suspect it relates to your Apple ID being shared. When I get a text from another iPhone it shows up on my two iPads as well. They are identified to Apple with the same ID as my phone. That is not the case with text messages from Android phones, which only go to my phone, actually going to my telephone number rather than to me.
I suspect it relates to your Apple ID being shared.
Yes, the Apple ID is shared, but it’s really that Messages/iMessage is what is distributing messages between multiple iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As long as Messages/iMessage on the different devices are signed into the same account (i.e. the same Apple ID), the messages get distributed to all the devices.
Note that Messages can also receive SMS messages on your iPhone. Those messages don’t always get distributed to all your devices, however. SMS messages are the messages that show up green on Messages on your iPhone. You can set up your iPhone to forward SMS messages to iMessage and be picked up by your Mac, e.g. see https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/get-sms-texts-from-… . That generally works well for me, but there are times when SMS messages don’t get transmitted through to my Macs, and I haven’t figured out why yet.
You can also set up Messages in iCloud (see the menu Messages > iMessage on your Mac) which maintains a message history in iCloud and syncs your device Messages. I think if you don’t have this option turned on, then the messages don’t get distributed to your Macs if the application isn’t running on them.