Your Green Bubble Texts Can Be Forwarded to Your Mac, Too

Putting your iPhone’s Messages app on your Mac and/or iPad was a great move on Apple’s part. If you’re working on your Macor watching Netflix on your iPad, it’s a much more convenient to keep up with conversations on the same device than to constantly pick up your iPhone. But while iMessages tend to find their way without issue, “green bubble” texts often never appear. But they can, and they should.

On the iPhone, “green bubbles” are trouble. They mean no iMessage, no (easy) FaceTime, and a wrench thrown into the group chat. In reality, a green bubble really just means an SMS text from a non-Apple phone, and they wouldn’t have the poor reputation they do if Apple adopted RCS. But I digress: Green bubbles exist, and we still need them for texting other people.

Not only that, receiving green bubble texts on your Mac or iPad can be essential for logging into accounts. Whenever you attempt to sign into a service with SMS-based two-factor authentication (or 2FA), you’ll receive your 2FA code as a green bubble text. If you’re logging in on your Mac or iPad, and you receive the SMS to that device, you can autofill the code without needing to open the message at all. Otherwise, you need to pick up your iPhone, open the message, read the code, and enter it. Bleh.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Apple includes a feature called Text Message Forwarding, which does exactly that: You can forward text messages to any Apple device connected to your Apple ID. The problem is, this setting is often reset when changing iPhones, particularly when you don’t restore from your previous iPhone’s backup, leading to situations where you used to receive green bubble texts on your Mac, but no longer do.

It’s a simple issue to fix, though: Open your iPhone, tap the Settings app then go to Messages. Find “Text Message Forwarding” and tap on the option. Here, you’ll see every device signed into your Apple ID, including Macs, iPads, iPod touches, or other iPhones. All you need to do to start sending green bubbles to your other devices is to tap the slider next to each on this menu.

Keep this setting in mind if you notice your green bubbles not showing up on your Apple devices in the future.