Your Green Bubble Texts Can Also Be Redirected to Your Mac
Putting your iPhone’s Messages app on your Mac and/or iPad was a great move by Apple. Whether you’re on a Mac or watching Netflix on an iPad, it’s much more convenient to keep conversations on the same device than having to constantly pick up your iPhone. But while iMessages tend to find their way without problems, “green bubble” texts often never show up. But they can and should.
On the iPhone, “green bubbles” are a disaster. They mean no iMessage, no (simple) FaceTime, and a wrench thrown into a group chat. In fact, the green bubble means just an SMS text from a non-Apple phone and they wouldn’t have as bad a reputation as if Apple implemented RCS . But I digress: green bubbles exist, and we still need them to send text messages to other people.
Not only that, getting green text bubbles on your Mac or iPad may be necessary to sign in to accounts. Whenever you try to sign in to a service using SMS-based two-factor authentication (or 2FA), you will receive a 2FA code in the form of green bubble text. If you sign in on your Mac or iPad and receive an SMS on that device, you can automatically complete the code without opening the message at all. Otherwise, you need to take your iPhone, open the message, read the code, and enter it. Bleu.
It shouldn’t be like this. Apple includes a feature called Text Message Forwarding that does just that: you can forward text messages to any Apple device connected to your Apple ID. The problem is that this setting is often reset when you change iPhones, especially if you don’t restore from a previous iPhone backup, leading to situations where you used to get green text bubbles on your Mac but don’t anymore.
However, fixing this problem is simple: open your iPhone, tap the Settings app, then go to Messages . Find “Text Message Forwarding” and click on the option. Here you will see all the devices registered with your Apple ID, including Mac, iPad, iPod touch or other iPhones. All you need to do to start sending green bubbles to your other devices is tap the slider next to each in this menu.
Keep this setting in mind if you notice that your green bubbles won’t show up on your Apple devices in the future.