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How is Apple magically supposed to know that you've switched phones?

I think the point is that it shouldn't try taking control of my SMS.

uhhhh.... iMessage is opt-in and isn't enabled until you actively sign up for it in settings. You don't want it taking over your SMS & MMS - don't opt-in to it.

I'm pretty sure I did this recently - it sent as an iMessage and after a minute or two when the message still hadn't been delivered to the destination phone it fell back on SMS (I'm assuming the iMessage registration times out after a while, though?)

I can confirm this happened to me a year ago and it was extremely frustrating.

I had to call back and forth from Apple/AT&T over the period of two days before they figured out what was happening and disabled it. Missed tons of messages.