Text messages not sent 'phone number formatted incorrectly' - issue with UK providers

So hopefully it can be resolved by the provider, but if not, we are getting nowhere it seems.

I found this discussion from 3 years ago …

https://github.com/googlei18n/libphonenumber/issues/203

I take away 3 things from this …

  1. Android parses phone numbers in a certain way and blocks numbers that don’t fit to a certain set of rules.

  2. Make sure there’s no “(0)” in your numbers as “+44 (0)…” for UK numbers (or “+49 (0)…” for German numbers, I’m reluctant to think of this as a UK only thing) might not work.

  3. As there is an Android component at play here, this can of course be updated and changed, so an update could have changed or still could change the behaviour of the number parsing.
    If the problem is not caused by your provider, please tell us what exactly it says in Settings - About phone - Build number, so we can see which OS you are using, how up-to-date it is and conclude from that what stock message App is running.

The really strange parts that don’t add up at all (if the problem is not caused by the provider) are …

… with me counting Android updates as anything else …


A Google search suggests we are not talking about a Fairphone problem here, people get this error on every flavour of Android phone across the board.

Sony in such a case suggests checking whether messaging works in safe mode.
Here’s how to boot in safe mode, but use this with caution because you might lose some stuff along the way

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