How to unknowingly broadcast your personal iMessages to all the company’s iPads
iMessage activation nightmare and unclear UI
Today I brought my company iPhone 6 to the Apple Store to replace its dead battery. To still be reachable I took out its SIM card and plugged it into another company iPhone that I use for development as well, and exchanged some private messages with my wife.
As soon as I got my iPhone back from the Geniuses, I put the SIM back into it and got back to the office. That’s when things got weird.
A collegue of mine walked up to me and said: “I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think these message should belong here. They’re yours aren’t they?” and pointed me to his company iPad where — lo and behold — my thread with my wife was showing up in its Messages app.
Ops.
I started sweating and unlocked my company iPad where that very same thread appeared.
Now, my company uses the same iCloud account for around 25 devices, given to the most disparate people (hostesses, sales, devs, …). They’re for events, and they just use one app so a shared account was quicker. By then it was clear to me that they all had the thread on their Messages app (why would they even have messages activated I don’t know).
For all I knew, when I plugged the SIM to the secondary phone I just accepted my number to be associated with the company iCloud account (spoiler: wrong reason). I was in a hurry and just tapped yes to every incoming popup without bothering to read it (hell, I’m a iOS developer, I know what I’m doing! Ha).
I found nothing of help online.
I called Apple support. A super nice lady walked me through some settings change and all, but basically she was clueless as to how to resolve the situation. I tried messaging my wife again and when she replied, it still appeared everywhere. In my personal phone AND all those company devices.
So went the most of my afternoon.
Here’s what happened
I didn’t have money in my SIM card. It’s an auto-up contract, so basically it always sits at 0.05€ pretty much all the time until a payment is due. Everything is unlimited in my contract. But not iMessage activations. They’re a separate thing. They apparently don’t use neither data nor SMS to configure.
When I put my SIM in the secondary (company) iPhone, it tried activating iMessage on the phone number but couldn’t.
When I wrote my wife, my messages went out from my company’s iCloud account, not my number as I thought. My wife didn’t worry about it (it appeared in the header, but little did she know that it was worth mentioning), I didn’t either (because on my side this was invisible, save for the blue bubble — no sender address whatsoever).
When I put the SIM back to my phone, it couldn’t reactivate iMessage on my number: the setting kept spinning in circles. I thought it mattered, but it didn’t. Nobody could actually iMessage me using my phone number (because it wasn’t active).
What I learned
- Please, Apple, make the UI clearer on both sides of the thread. The recipient might just assume that since he knows who’s writing, all is good. And please show what account I’m using when writing.
- iMessage negotiations live outside data / text traffic
- Read the freakin’ popups
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