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Alex asked: “How can you send texts, without sending as an iMessage to other iPhones when you’re not using data on the iPhone?”
Alex, you have three options.
First of all you can disable iMessages altogether, most people have unlimited text messages anyway, so you may not want it on, if you don’t use the rest of the features that come with it. For that go to Settings and Messages, and the first option should be to turn iMessage on or off.
You can disable iMessages altogether
If you’d like keep iMessages as your first choice, but have the phone automatically default to sending an SMS if you don’t have a data connection, you can turn that option on in the same settings screen, it’s a little bit lower down the screen and the option reads “Send as SMS”.
Your last option is to just wait for the iMessage to fail, and tap on the red exclamation mark and choose “send as SMS,” but you’ll have to do that manually each time, so it only seems like a good option if you normally have access to data and iMessages only rarely fail to send.