Comment Re:It's all about the Phone Number ID (Score 2, Informative) 136
The real issue is that you can't opt out of automatically having your phone number become and account/id in iMessage.
I want to use iMessage on my iPhone, but only with regular iCloud accounts, not with the phone number being used to create an account.
Unfortunately, the iOS team doesn't give the user that option.
The option is given when you set up a device for iMessage. It explicitly asks how you want to be contacted. By number, by email(s)/AppleIDs, or all of the above