Beware the Apple iPhone bug that could break your ability to text on cruise

[Sundodger]

We just got back from the 15 day eastbound TransAtlantic Cruise on the Disney Magic. Had an awesome time and will post a separate review later. But several of us ran into a rather unique bug that essentially broke all ability to send text messages from the cruise, even if you bought a data package.

 

It's a bug that could affect other cruises that change time zones, and it's not a problem with or unique to DCL, but to the iPhone.

 

The issue cropped up the day after we left Halifax and started our 6 day at sea journey across the Atlantic. We began turning our clocks forward one hour each night to eventually get us on Copenhagen time. But Day 1 of the sea day, texting stopped working. Not just for me but for several other cruisers. You could still surf the net, check email, etc. But texting was dead.

 

I spent about two days working with Pedrag, their internet consultant (who was awesome, by the way) trying to help sleuth it out.

 

Here's the deal: When you go in and manually set the time on your phone, as many of us were doing each night because there are no cities who exist in the time zones between Eastern Canada and Iceland, it no longer matches the time stamp the ship is trying to send the text from and that messes Apple up. So it rejects the text messages.

 

How to prevent the issue: DO NOT manually set the clock on your phone. Yes, if you head into uninhabited time zones your cell phone clock will be wrong. It'll either stay on the last time zone you were in, or if you let it ping the ship for cellular data, it'll set to GMT (UTC) time which is +5 from New York; +8 from Seattle. Their advice, bring a watch. Or remember how many hours the current ship time is from what your cell phone says. (And be sure to know this! He said they have had two people in the past that missed the ship because their cell phone time didn't match the actual time and they forgot)

 

Note: This is really only an issue I'd think for Trans-ocean cruises where you're out in the middle of nowhere. Near-shore cruises that stay in time zones where people live, like the Caribbean or European cruises, you won't need to manually change your clocks to strange time zones so this won't be a problem. If you do need to adjust, set the time via a pre-selected city in their World Time List, don't just set it manually. So for the vast majority of cruises, you can ignore this. But if you do go repositioning over a long distance, no matter the cruise line, keep this in mind.

 

And again, this seemed to only affect Apple phones. If you are not using an iPhone or don't care about texting at sea, then there's likely no issue of manually setting the time.

 

What to do if you did manually set your clock and now texting no longer works: The regular SMS texts might be done for the cruise ? I didn't get that to work again until I got back to the U.S. But you can still use iMessage if you're lucky to need to text with those who have an iPhone too. First of all, you need to let your phone set the time automatically so let it connect to the cell signal no matter what time it'll say. Then you need to sign out of iMessage, then reboot your phone, then sign back into iMessage and it should work. Sometimes it took multiple attempts to go through this process but it eventually worked and I got my iMessaging back. Or you can use other methods like Facebook Messenger or Twitter, etc. It's just Apple SMS texts that it messes up.

 

And at least on the Magic, their staff will know what to do :)

[p17blo]

Good information. I was on this cruise also :). Id like to note that having done the TAs 4 times now; I have a list of time zones that match the changes we go through. There are cities to match every time zone change. There are shown in the screen shot. Hopefully this will help others.

The key one is Praia (Verde Islands) which covers what is otherwise a missing time zone during that crossing.

[coldflame]

Messages app of every iOS device uses iMessage, by default, when communicating to another iDevice or OS X 10.10. Which works fine with internet connection since it's just a data-based protocol. If you want to send TXT/SMS it will not work, even with data plan -- will not work on Android phones either. SMS/TXT is a cellular-based protocol and relies on having cell towers in the vicinity (which in the middle of nowhere there aren't any).

 

The solution is to use Whatsapp or Google Voice app, which send all txt/sms as data, which means you can use it as long as you have a working connection to the Internet.