Messaging

Let’s inspect this sentence carefully.

J1-Helena wrote:

When she sends an SMS to me at my phone number (Verizon), it goes to my iPad instead of my Android phone.

Several questions come up.

• Has this phone number always been associated with non-Apple products? Might it have been associated with an iPhone in the past and not de-registered from iMessage? If so: Deregister iMessage on your iPhone or online - Apple Support
• Are you certain she is sending the message to your telephone number (and not your Apple ID)? She is offered that choice if she selects your contact card to use as the message recipient.

If you log out of iMessage on the iPad, and it successfully deactivates, then your wife would need to delete any text conversations that she has had with you. After that, and it can take about 24 hours to deactivate iMessage, the two of you should have no issues with sending SMS back and forth with the phones. She just needs to be sure she has an SMS/MMS plan active on her account.

I've read about this in the past. The problem seems to arise when using cross platform products. You receive SMS on the Android phone, but are now receiving iMessage on the iPad. Once an iMessage has been sent/received with the iPad, it seems it will associate the phone number and email both with iMessage, therefore creating an issue with your wife sending you a text. To be honest, I've not seen a resolution posted about that. I recommended to one person to try deregistering their phone number with iMessage, but I've not received a response if it works. Unfortunately, if you disable iMessage on the iPad, you will not be able to text your wife, since you cannot use the Android phone to forward to the iPad, like you can with an iPhone.

You may have to run this by Apple Engineers to see if there is a resolution. I see this being something difficult to resolve.

Glad to hear. Just don't activate iMessage on the iPad again, and you should be fine.