How-To Unlink a Phone Number from Apple ID, iMessage and Facetime

GottaBeMobile offers some great tips to sell your iPhone for the best price. I received a new iPhone with a new number so I wanted to cancel my previous iPhone and number. I wanted to remove this number from my Apple ID so that it was removed from being used in iMessage and Facetime on all of my devices.

After some google searching there were all kinds of “how tos” and forum posts from people who had different ways of doing it- none of which worked for me.

Finally I found this Apple KB article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5538

Scroll down under the section that says “How to Unlink a Phone Number“. I followed those steps and my “old” number was removed from iMessage and Facetime on all of my devices. I could now erase / factory reset the old phone and not worry that the phone number or device was still associated with my account.

Here’s the steps from the KB article above, that worked for me:

To remove a phone number from an Apple ID, sign out of FaceTime and Messages on your iPhone. Sign out in the following locations:

• Settings > Messages > Send & Receive. Tap your Apple ID, then tap Sign Out.
• Settings > FaceTime. Tap your Apple ID, then tap Sign Out.

This should remove your phone number from other devices using the same Apple ID with FaceTime and Messages.

If the phone number is still available on other devices after you sign out of FaceTime and iMessage on the iPhone, you may need to sign out of iMessage and FaceTime on all your devices, then sign in to FaceTime and Messages again on devices you want to use.

Note: If you no longer have access to the iPhone that is using the number you want to remove, reset your Apple ID password.