I’m puzzling over how the free messaging system recently introduced on iOS (Apple) devices works. Recently I went to text someone who I regularly text. A message came back saying “Who is this?”. It turned out that my phone had worked out the other person also had an iPhone and routed the message via the free message system rather than SMS. I didn’t ask it to do that, it just did it. But, why should it randomly start doing that when it had previously sent the messages via text, and, even more puzzling, why should it display a different phone number to the person at the other end? I am wondering (I don’t know) if the number displayed to the recipient is the number my phone had when I bought it, before my old number was ported across to it.
