Alarm & false storage full warning triggered iPhone Recovery Assistant - iOS 26.0.1

[djc6]

Running iOS 26.0.1 on an iPhone 15 Pro Max.

This morning alarm went off, a warning was on screen that iPhone storage was full, and once the alarm was turned off the phone kicked into iPhone Recovery Assistant. I followed the prompts and it eventually came back to normalcy. I went into Settings and there was a warning that iPhone storage is full, but only 97GB of 256GB is used. Warning disappeared once I checked the iPhone storage. I thought maybe it meant iCloud Storage was full, but only 604GB of 2TB is used.

I noticed "iCloud Backup" says "There isn't enough free space on this device to finish a backup." and that the last backup was Yesterday around 1AM. I manually triggered a backup to iCloud and it was successful.

Whats up with this phone?

 

[djc6]

Now I'm trying to sort out why suddenly RCS Messaging is "Waiting for activation" when it worked in the past...

 

[djc6]

I first tried fixing RCS issue by resetting network setting and getting a new eSIM to no avail. RCS issue ended up being fixed by backing up phone via USB & restoring via USB. Hopefully this also addressed whatever triggered recovery assistant.

 

[corvid]

I had something very similar happen to me! I signed up for an account here just to respond to this thread and add my experience.

The main difference is I had no alarms set in my case. I am also running iOS 26.0.1 on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. When I woke up this morning, I unlocked my phone, and immediately got the storage full warning. I clicked the Manage button on the pop-up and my phone froze, then shutdown. When I turned the phone back on, it took a while to start, and booted into recovery. I let recovery run, and it found nothing wrong. The phone then rebooted into iOS normally, but I still had the storage warning despite over 100GB free. I deleted some stuff I haven't used in a while, and the warning went away with now over 300GB free.

Thankfully RCS still seems to be working and so far I haven't had any other issues. In my entire time of owning iOS devices, I've never had anything like this happen before.