iMessage chat bubble changed from blue to green out of nowhere? Here’s how to make it go back to blue from green.

The infamous green bubble syndrome on iPhone has become a topic of great controversy in recent times. Not only Android users, sometimes, even iPhone users get a taste of the green bubble.

That’s correct. Even though you and your contact both are using an iPhone, sometimes the message bubble will turn green instead of the usual blue.

There are many reasons for this and one of the prime reasons seems to be that it happens when you are out of your home country i.e. roaming.

When you are roaming outside of your home country/network, something in the iPhone makes the iMessage go wonky and it turns the message bubbles from blue to green.

In this article, let us see how to get iMessage conversation to go from green to blue.

Reset iMessage settings

In this method, we are just going to quickly refresh the iMessage settings. Follow the below steps:

1. Quit the Messages app.
   – In the latest iOS versions, you can use the gesture to go to recent apps view and swipe it up to close it.
   – In the older iOS versions, you can double tap on the home button to go to the recent apps view and swipe the messages app to close it.
2. Open the Settings app.
3. Scroll down and tap on Messages.
4. In this screen, the button right next to iMessage will be enabled. Disable it and re-enable the same immediately.

After you perform the above steps, open the Messages app and try sending a message to an iPhone contact and see if the iMessage bubble has gone from green to blue.

Restart your iPhone

1. Quit the Messages app.
   – In the latest iOS versions, you can use the gesture to go to recent apps view and swipe it up to close it.
   – In the older iOS versions, you can double tap on the home button to go to the recent apps view and swipe the messages app to close it.
   
2. Restart your iPhone.
   – In newer iPhones, long press Sleep/Wake button + Volume Up to get the Power options. The slide to power off.
   – In older iPhones, long press Sleep/Wake button to get the Power options. The slide to power off.
   
3. Turn in back on.
4. Open Messages.
5. Compose and send a new iMessage to the other person.

Check if iMessage is turned on the other side

See, iMessage is is basically sort of text message between two people.

Even though you have enabled iMessage on your side, the other person may not have. In such cases, the bubble will still be green even though they are using an iPhone – as iMessage is disabled.

For iMessage to work properly, both (or all of) the involved parties should have the iMessages option turned on at their end for iMessage to work well for everyone.

So, ask them if they have iMessage turned on at their end. If not, ask them to follow the steps below:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap on Messages.
3. Tap the button next to iMessage to enable it.

Try sending a picture

What the green bubble essentially means is that it is a text message and not an iMessage. So, it means that iPhone thinks that it is an SMS thread instead of an iMessage thread.

To force iOS to forget it’s an SMS thread, you can try sending a picture to the other person. As you know, you cannot send a picture via an SMS text message. So, when you try to send a picture (which iMessage fully supports), iOS may have to try and switch back to iMessage (blue bubble) from a SMS message (green bubble).

Delete all the messages in the conversation

When this problem occurs, it usually occurs for a particular contact. And it does not affect all the conversations.

So, what you could do is to clear up all the conversations/text messages in the particular affected thread.

Once you are done deleting all the messages in the conversation, try to send a message to them now.

The green send icon should now turn into a blue send icon.

Update your iPhone

May be there is absolutely nothing wrong with your iPhone or iMessage setup. May be everything is fine at your and there is an isolated bug.

I would recommend you to check and see if you have any update available for your device.

To check for an update, go to: Settings > General > Software Update.

Apart from bringing new features and security fixes, almost all the updates quash a lot of bugs, both known and unknown. Most of the time, the update changelog doesn’t say much but they do carry a lot of improvements.

Get help from Apple

At this point, we don’t have much else to try and see if that would fix the issue. If you are iMessage conversations are still green even though both the involved parties are on iPhone, then I recommend getting help from Apple.

Walk in to the nearest Apple service center and talk to the experts there. They should definitely be able to help.