Sometimes there are bugs that happen and hit wide swaths of devices causing serious problems for users, and other times a teeny tiny thing breaks and it only affects a handful of people. It doesn’t really matter, though. Bugs are still frustrating.

On October 1st my friend Ry went on a hike. He completed his hike, and I sent him the usual, terrible, canned fitness response that we send one another ironically. “Way to take a hike. 🌳” He said thanks, and then the Messages app in iOS said Ry was only available via satellite. I thought he was being a fancy lad on a hike using satellite messaging, but he was no longer on a hike, and was on 5G cellular.

He tried force-quitting Messages, and restarting his iPhone, and reseting his network settings, but no matter what he did, my iPhone insisted Ry was only reachable via satellite. So then I restarted my iPhone, and I tried turning off and on all the various connection methods at my disposal.

That’s when I found out that everyone else having a one-on-one conversation with Ry from an iOS 18 device was also experiencing what I was experiencing. Anyone on 17.4, or using macOS Sonoma¹ just had messages pop through with the usual iMessage tag.

What gives? How could only conversations with him be stuck in satellite mode and only on iOS 18 devices? This is a very annoying problem, because every time you send a message “via satellite” it bugs you about it, and you can’t do things like send images or media. Naturally, if he was really on satellite, you wouldn’t want to do that.

I did what everyone else does in this scenario and went to bed with the expectation that the passage of time would reset something.

October 2nd was the same deal. Ry was still stranded over Earth like a modern-day balloon boy.

I opened his contact info and messaged the email address tied to his Apple ID, instead of the phone number. It went through as a regular iMessage. I tried switching back to the phone number and it went back to satellite. Another friend tried the same trick, but stayed on the email address only to have it switch to satellite a few seconds after he messaged.

I was on to something, though, right? Maybe the problem was on the receiving end (our iOS 18 iPhones) instead of the sending end (Ry’s iOS 18 iPhone).

Drastic times call for drastic measures, and so I turned iMessage off and on again. Hold onto your butts.

Fortunately, no raptors were released, but the conversation thread with Ry split into two. One thread had some messages and was stuck in satellite mode. The other thread had some other messages and was in normal iMessage mode. I force-quit Messages for the zillionth time in two days, and when I relaunched it, the conversations had merged back together and the satellite mode was gone.

It was all iMessage, baby.

I relayed this information to the other friends, and they did the same thing. Messaging Ry returned to normal… but I hadn’t noticed one side effect, reported by another friend.

On the lock screen of the iPhone, and only the lock screen of the iPhone, notifications from Ry were now labeled “Maybe: Ry Amidon To You & Ry Amidon”. As if Ry and I were in a group text with Ry.

For crying out loud. The Watch notifications, Mac notifications, and even the display name in iOS were all singular Ry. That’s when I remembered the email address tied to the Apple ID that I had messaged earlier.

I blew away the email address and then the “Maybe” went away. Everything was normal.

I typically don’t open Feedbacks when I can’t reproduce something (and I absolutely can’t reproduce whatever this is) but I put together one with system logs and screenshots and fired it into the void².

If I had to guess (and it’s probably better if I don’t) it seems like Ry’s phone pushed some status to Apple’s iMessage servers which was pushed to our iOS 18 devices… and stuck. I can’t think of another reason why the satellite messaging state was preserved until we each toggled off iMessage support on our individual devices. There’s no toggle to disable sending and receiving satellite messages in Settings. In fact, if you search Settings for “satellite” it doesn’t return any results at all.

Having satellite messaging is definitely a boon to people that have experienced real emergencies and have been otherwise disconnected from the world. Ry, however, wasn’t experiencing any such issues—so we all just got some puzzling inconvenience.

I can’t even say for certain that I fixed anything, because in the grand tradition of internet problem-solving, all I can report is that it “works for me!”

If anyone does eventually run across this weirdness (hello, Google searchers!), I hope you can at least learn from what I tried. If you’ve got an easier fix, or you happen to work at Apple and can just toggle this stuff from the heavens, then drop me a line.