Bubble trouble
Six Colors subscriber Ampsonic—an excellent source of questions—asks:
Why do some names turn red in Messages when a non-iOS user is added?
It’s all about hegemony! Ok, not quite, but it is about the tricky issue of how Apple deals with email addresses connected or not connected to iCloud accounts.
Outside looking in
When you enter an email address or type one into the address field in Messages, the software does a quick behind-the-scenes check. Messages tries to determine if the address is associated with an active iCloud account. As you accept or paste in an address, you might notice that it always briefly lights up black text within a blue lozenge. If the address isn’t connected, the background changes from blue to red. This sometimes happens so quickly you don’t see it move from blue to red.
Red doesn’t mean you can’t send a message to someone. Rather, it reveals that iMessage can’t be used. If you’re adding addresses to a group conversation, you might notice that if you start with a contact or an email address with iMessage active, these all appear as black-on-blue. The moment you add someone who doesn’t have a valid iMessage account, all the addresses switch to black on red.
There’s a variant, too: if you choose a contact with only a phone number connected or enter a phone number, and that number isn’t connected to an iCloud account, that entry appears as black on green.
This color confusion is even more peculiar because Apple can show you how it’s checking live. Start typing a name, phone number, or email address into the To field, and as autocomplete shows matches, it color codes the text: gray for not yet determined, blue for iCloud, and green for SMS. The grays usually change within a second or two to blue or green.
The moment you click in the message field, the red switches to the appropriate color, too. It turns to green text (no lozenge), and the field shows Text Message • SMS or Text Message • RCS. (RCS is the standard Google uses, and is enabled by default starting with iOS 18 and related operating systems when they use your iPhone for text messaging. The text “SMS” always appears whether or not the rich multimedia MMS option is available.)
As shown in the lifecycle figure above, sometimes you will see a blue lozenge for a match—cached? preliminary?—but once you click in the message field, and shifts to green text!
Better red than dead
More confusingly, even if you type in a non-iCloud-connected email address and the contact with which the address is associated also has an iCloud-hooked-up address, Messages forces the use of the iCloud-linked address! I haven’t found a way to force use of a non-iCloud address without removing that email from the contact card.
There’s one edge case you might encounter: If you enable Screen Time for yourself for communicating with others (Settings > Screen Time > Communication Limits and either During Screen Time or During Downtime), recipients with whom you cannot message at the moment will appear in red. You can override Screen Time to bypass that self-limitation.
The upshot is that red addresses are a gap in Apple’s color-coding schema. Ideally, unless there’s a legitimate problem with the addressee, Apple should use the information it already has to show a green lozenge.
For further perusal
Did you know I wrote a desperately long book that can help? Take Control of FaceTime and Messages (also covering Phone and telephony) is quite lengthy because Apple under-documents many features found in this flagship app, leaving that job to me.
I found frustrating just the sheer number of things that lacked information at support.apple.com or which had “drug interaction”-like problems where features conflicted with each other. (I didn’t take out my frustration on the reader!) If you’ve ever been baffled by how to get something down in any of those apps, I expect I have covered it in the book. If not, tell me what’s missing!
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]
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