Hello!
I’m posting here because I’ve found success! After a few days of not being able to get iMessage or FaceTime to “activate”, I finally got it to work!
I was having the same issue as everyone else after the iOS26 update. If I knew people were having this problem, I don’t think I would have done the update so quickly.
Like everyone else, I looked online and followed the troubleshooting list *except* for signing in and out of my Apple account. I avoided this because I was afraid I could lose some data. Through all the trial and all errors, I even ended up sending Apple support the request to add my phone number to my account twice (once on my own and once after I finally managed to get a call in through to Apple support). The tech specialist I spoke to on the phone said that they usually process the request and send an email within 24 hrs, which I didn’t get from the first time I sent the request. I was working with Apple support yesterday so I checked today to see if I got an email regarding adding the phone number to my account and there was nothing.
So I finally buckled down and signed in and out of my Apple acount and it worked! Since I can understand how frustrating it is to be in this situation and seemingly waiting endlessly for a software update to fix the issue, which may or may not come for some time, etc. etc… I am posting here what I did in case it can miraculously help someone else! Fingers crossed 🤞🏻:
I think a lot of this is obvious, but there are a couple steps I took where you could deviate. As I don’t know if deviating matters or not, I’m sharing what I did specifically in case that is the difference to making this work or not!
To sign out of your Apple account:
- Go to Settings > Your name (your Apple account at the very top) > Sign Out (at the very bottom)
- Here, I followed the prompts to “Sign Out But Don’t Erase”
- I turned off “Find My”
- I opted to keep all the available data on my phone
- If you did it correctly, the last part should be to tap “Confirm and Sign Out”.
note: if you chose “Erase this iPhone”, the last part would be to tap “Sign Out” and then tap “Sign Out” one more time.
To restart iPhone:
I did this through Settings, not by pressing the power button and not by doing a force restart where you press the volume buttons before holding the power button.
- Go to Settings > General > Shut Down
- After the Screen turns black, press the power button and bring your phone back to life!
To sign back into your Apple account:
- Go back to Settings > Apple Account (that lovely white box and the blue circle design at the top)
- Choose to “Sign in Manually”. You’ll need to know your Apple ID email address and password. I didn’t choose to sign in through another device.
- Follow all the prompts and voilà!
Then go to the Messages settings to turn on iMessage and hopefully this time it’ll stick as it did for me!
I seriously hope this helps and that it isn’t just a one-off.
Good luck!
Alicia
