Device Added to Your Account ⇥ morrick.me
Now, with these older iOS devices in particular, battery life is what it is, and I don’t always remember to keep them all charged at all times. It happens with my Mac laptops as well. Whenever I revive one of these devices, if it’s still able to access iCloud and other Apple ID-related services, I get a notification on all my other Apple devices that a certain device has now access to FaceTime and iMessage.
The wording in this notification has changed for the worse in more recent versions of Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS. […]
The alert doesn’t actually mean that the the device was added in the user sense. Most of the time the device was already in my account, but a software update or something meant that Apple needed to do some kind of key refresh. It feels like I’m being interrupted for an implementation detail.
I do not see this as frequently as, it seems, Mori or Tsai — I do not have a stable of old devices I rotate between, nor am I a software developer. When I do, it is almost never because I have purchased a new device. It is usually because of, as Tsai writes, a software update or perhaps adding a travel SIM, so it is poorly confirming something I already know in an interruptive and ambiguous way. Occasionally, the software update was installed automatically, so I am surprised by the alert on a different device but have no way of understanding what happened. Then I think about what I should actually do with this information, particularly with the revised wording of this alert:
Your Apple ID and phone number are now being used for iMessage on a new Mac.
If you recently signed in to “[Device Name]”, you can ignore this notification.
[OK]
What do I do now? That is rhetorical; I understand I would search it. (I also asked Siri on iOS 26 — you know, the one with the product knowledge — and it, too, searched Google.) But what does a normal person do now? This is scary and unhelpful, yet the user interface says in the same breath it might be irrelevant.
It reminds me a little of the often-wrong map in the dialog box for two-factor authentication. These are features ostensibly to promote greater security but they only erode users’ awareness if they are not designed with more precision and care.