Phone compatibility

[KentB]

I have a question about phone compatibility, and it's impossible to get through Visibile's annoying automatic chat bot to get an answer from a real person.

A relative of mine is a Verizon Wireless customer, but I'm trying to get them to save money by moving to Visible.

She has a phone that works on Verizon's network, but when I plug the phone's IMEI number into Visible's site to test compatibility, it states that the phone is not compatible.

How could that be? The phone works on the Verizon network, Visible uses Verizon's network, so what's the problem, why wouldn't the phone work on Visible's network?

The phone is not old enough to get rid of it and buy a new phone, but can anyone tell me why a Verizon phone wouldn't work for Visible?

[DeanKevin64 · Accepted solution]

Visible doesn't put much effort into updating the IMEI database. I am guessing the phone is Android, probably a Motorola phone if I had to guess and more than 2 years old. Depending on how old the phone is sure it maybe possible to work on Verizon but not necessarily on Visible. There are things in the firmware that may cause things such as visual voicemail, hotspot, wi-fi calling, possibly not getting data to work to name a few. Visible seems to play nice with iPhones less than 6 years old and Pixels less the 3 years old. Motorola is not friendly at all with Visible since Motorola makes phones for Visible to sell and only those made for Visible will be in their database and the phone has to be less then 2 years old beside. I know this because I bought a 2021 model Motorola phone when I joined that year, fast forward to Sept 2022 the system was updated from cloud servers to Verizon's core system and they wiped the IMEI database and my 2021 model phone showed not compatible although it did still work on the new system. As far as Samsung I think it is hit or miss on compatibility and would likely need to be less than 3 years old.

If you need to get by the bot on chat type agent or live agent, you may need to do this more than once but eventually you should get on the list for a real person. I highly doubt they will be able to help but you can ask.

One thing to point out is the app is needed for activation and whatever phone is used needs to meet the minimum OS system requirements to download it on the phone.