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iPhone 12 and 12 Pro Users Complain of Missing SMS Text Messages and Message Notifications

Wildo6882 said:
The only thing that actually works is fully closing out Messages when you're done with it. That's the only way I receive notifications for all of my messages. It has NOTHING to do with Android, or groups, or Bluetooth, etc. If you leave Messages open, it is showing the last message as read like you're still in the app, even though you may not actively be using it. This is a huge issue that Apple needs to get figured out ASAP. I've been looking at other phone options, but I don't want to switch, if they would just pull their heads out of their collective rears and fix this. This is a huge problem for a core function of a phone. It's nearly as bad as not as receiving phone calls.
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Nope! I think there may be several issues related to several things going on.
If I leave messages open, or if I completely exit it, I will NOT get a lock screen notification (but only from certain senders) as long as bluetooth is on. On the other hand, I do get them from certain other senders. Once I turn bluetooth off, I get the lock screen notifications 100% of the time from ANY sender.
For me, it has nothing at all to do with whether or not messages is still open.
 
I have an iPad and a new iPhone 12promax, both with IOS 14.2.. My settings for Messages are exactly the same on both. But I received a a text message 30 minutes ago on my iPad but still have not received it on my iPhone 12!!!
 
MSUalum said:
I have an iPad and a new iPhone 12promax, both with IOS 14.2.. My settings for Messages are exactly the same on both. But I received a a text message 30 minutes ago on my iPad but still have not received it on my iPhone 12!!!
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There are so many different variations on this issue. That is a strange one. If it was an iMessage then I see how you could have received it directly on iPad but not iPhone but if it was a text message then those would be funneled through your cellular provider which means direct to iPhone and then handed off to iPad. Unless you have a cellular enabled iPad. Does that make sense?
 
I just made a major discovery --
If I turn imessage off on my phone and BOTH my Macs, I no longer seem to have any message problems. Lock screen notifications come through, messages come through. So far, all seems to be working fine! I can even leave bluetooth turned on (my problem before was that I was not getting lock screen notifications from certain sources with bluetooth turned on).
The only thing is, I want to test some more in getting messages sent to me from iphone users. I HAVE seen in various places that I may miss some messages with it's turned off (??) Anyone know about this and why that is?
 
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I went to my local apple store in Gold Coast Australia, they said they never hear of this problem before, I have a 3 weeks old iPhone 12 pro. Somehow I don't believe them, told me to go home and restore the phone from a backup and see what happens, tried it and nothing changed, also did a factory reset and setup as a new phone and it was still the same.I downloaded the beta version 14.3 on Tuesday and after everything was working fine. Was getting text notifications when Bluetooth was on or off and they were showing up on my Apple Watch as well. Today I updated to the new version of the beta and it totally messed up everything again. Now no text notifications when Bluetooth on but also none on my Apple Watch, before on iOS 14.2 when Bluetooth was on I was still getting text notifications on my watch but when I turned off my watch and bluetooth was still on I wasn't getting any notifications on my phone. The beta version until the update today was working fine in all scenarios, bluetooth on or off and watch connected or not, text notifications were showing up on phone on Lock Screen . I tried what @jay968 mentioned, turning iMessage off in settings and it works, getting notifications with Bluetooth on and also on my watch, also watch turned off the notifications show up on Lock Screen on phone
 
I’m on RC2 and it’s working flawlessly so far. But to be honest, it is a little disappointing to spend $1200 for a phone and have to get excited that your text message notifications actually work
 
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robertkollar said:
I went to my local apple store in Gold Coast Australia, they said they never hear of this problem before, I have a 3 weeks old iPhone 12 pro. Somehow I don't believe them, told me to go home and restore the phone from a backup and see what happens, tried it and nothing changed, also did a factory reset and setup as a new phone and it was still the same.I downloaded the beta version 14.3 on Tuesday and after everything was working fine. Was getting text notifications when Bluetooth was on or off and they were showing up on my Apple Watch as well. Today I updated to the new version of the beta and it totally messed up everything again. Now no text notifications when Bluetooth on but also none on my Apple Watch, before on iOS 14.2 when Bluetooth was on I was still getting text notifications on my watch but when I turned off my watch and bluetooth was still on I wasn't getting any notifications on my phone. The beta version until the update today was working fine in all scenarios, bluetooth on or off and watch connected or not, text notifications were showing up on phone on Lock Screen . I tried what @jay968 mentioned, turning iMessage off in settings and it works, getting notifications with Bluetooth on and also on my watch, also watch turned off the notifications show up on Lock Screen on phone
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Good to hear that my findings and suggestions are working for you. Question: Are you confident that you are getting ALL messages with imessage turned off? I'd like to just do that and be done with it but I am afraid of turning imessage off totally.
 
I've been doing some more testing. It seems as though imessage can be left on in the phone as long as it's turned off in the computer. When I do have it turned off in the computer(s), I am experiencing normal messaging, the way it has worked for years. Seems to work without fail now.

I wonder if what's going on is if imessage is turned on in the computer, the computer then oftentimes gets the message before the phone does and thus marks it as read. So the lock screen notification never happens on the phone. And then, maybe sometimes the phone gets the message before the computer does and thus we do see the lock screen notification on the phone. If on the other hand, imessage is off in the computer, the computer never gets it before the phone and the phone always notifies properly. OR if you don't even own a Mac, you may not have any notification issues at all.

If this is so, it might explain the inconsistent nature of receiving a lock screen notification. I've seen a lot of comments stating that there is no rhyme nor reason to the messaging problems. Well if my theories are correct, there sure is.

BTW, I do not use the beta releases. What I have been reporting is all with 14.2.1

EDIT: According to some reports in the ios14 thread, 14.3 RC2 may have actually fixed the messaging issue anyway!
 
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jay968 said:
Good to hear that my findings and suggestions are working for you. Question: Are you confident that you are getting ALL messages with imessage turned off? I'd like to just do that and be done with it but I am afraid of turning imessage off totally.
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I tried the other thing you recommended turning off iMessage on my computer. I have a MacBook Pro, so I signed out of iMessage on it. I also turned off my other 2 iPads. I sent text message to myself through Skype credit and I’m receiving them on my iPhone with iMessage turned on on it. After this I turned on one of my iPads and made sure iMessage is turned on on it. I sent a text again to myself and received it on my phone again. So this works. I’m not sure about iMessages not coming through. I can’t test that by myself. I will have to ask one of my friends who had iPhone to send me texts
 
robertkollar said:
factory reset
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Old wives tale! ;)
FooArk said:
I’m on RC2 and it’s working flawlessly so far. But to be honest, it is a little disappointing to spend $1200 for a phone and have to get excited that your text message notifications actually work
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Sounds encourging.

Pretty sure this is deeper than turning off iMessages on a computer or BT etc. This is an Apple problem they need to fix. Simply ridiculous that this happened in the first place.
 
Nobody here can say definitively that it’s working after they do this or do that to their phone.

I do receive SMS messages from many people but there are three or four people who send SMS messages that never appear. If you don’t happen to be texting regularly with someone who triggers this problem then you don’t know if it is still broken. Apple themselves or the cellular providers are the only ones that can get this fixed. Turning off Bluetooth, turning off Apple Watch, turning off iMessage, are not acceptable at all. This is a “pro” phone that does less then the iPhone 8 that it replaced.

Already spent many hours talking to friendly but unhelpful tech-support agents. i’ll wait for the official 14.3 on Monday and then if it’s not fixed, I’ll be back on the phone with Verizon and Apple. 🤬
 
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PHXHow? said:
Nobody here can say definitively that it’s working after they do this or do that to their phone.

I do receive SMS messages from many people but there are three or four people who send SMS messages that never appear. If you don’t happen to be texting regularly with someone who triggers this problem then you don’t know if it is still broken. Apple themselves or the the cellular providers are the only ones this can get this fixed. Turning off Bluetooth, turning off Apple Watch, turning off iMessage, are not acceptable at all. This is a “pro” phone that does less then the iPhone 8 that it replaced.

Already spent many hours talking to friendly but unhelpful tech-support agents. i’ll wait for the official 14.3 on Monday and then if it’s not fixed, I’ll be back on the phone with Verizon and Apple. 🤬
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What you say is true, but at least I have found a way to make my phone work the way I want it to, till Apple does fix it.. Frankly, I never could understand the need for imessage and would much rather have a working, messaging phone than having imessage. In the past, when I have owned other iphones, I have always turned it off as it wasn't always compatible with Androids and I saw no benefit to using it anyway.
 
jay968 said:
What you say is true, but at least I have found a way to make my phone work the way I want it to, till Apple does fix it.. Frankly, I never could understand the need for imessage and would much rather have a working, messaging phone than having imessage. In the past, when I have owned other iphones, I have always turned it off as it wasn't always compatible with Androids and I saw no benefit to using it anyway.
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The idea is that it seamlessly works with regular messaging, so that iMessage is used when it could be, otherwise regular cellular based text messaging is used.
 
C DM said:
The idea is that it seamlessly works with regular messaging, so that iMessage is used when it could be, otherwise regular cellular based text messaging is used.
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Yes, I understand that. What I am saying though is that for my own personal use, I have never seen any benefit to using imessage. SMS is fine for me.
 
jukeboxaddict said:
I'm on RC2 and this is still a problem for me, so I don't think it's fully fixed.
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So I should have known.

Kinda like folks saying they turned of this or that and it fixed the problem. Nah...it probably really didn’t fix anything. Frack.
 
jay968 said:
Yes, I understand that. What I am saying though is that for my own personal use, I have never seen any benefit to using imessage. SMS is fine for me.
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iMessage is more reliable because you get delivery confirmations.
 
PHXHow? said:
iMessage is more reliable because you get delivery confirmations.
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OK for me, this isn't important. If I've got something important enough that I need to know if the message was received. I'm more likely to make a phone call. And I'm certainly not interested in the least about using an emoji. Still can't figure out why anyone above the age of 14 finds them appealing.

I can see that some imessage features may benefit some, but nothing about it is important to me. I've used SMS for years with no problems.
 
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jay968 said:
OK for me, this isn't important. If I've got something important enough that I need to know if the message was received. I'm more likely to make a phone call. And I'm certainly not interested in the least about using an emoji. Still can't figure out why anyone above the age of 14 finds them appealing.

I can see that some imessage features may benefit some, but nothing about it is important to me. I've used SMS for years with no problems.
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You aren’t having the problem of SMS messages not reaching their destination when the recipient has an iPhone 12 Pro. I have learned through this recent frustration that shooting an SMS off into space and assuming it reaches its destination isn’t something that can be relied upon. Before the iPhone 12 Pro when SMS was reasonably reliable, I would have felt like you. 🤷🏼‍♂️ <over 14 and still love emoji 😊>
 
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Apple is destroying their reputation. This bug is unacceptable and has been going on for weeks.
 
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To sum up again, I have imessage turned on in my phone and off on both of my computers. I am using 14.2.1 and I am having no problems whatsoever with messages from any source showing up on my lock screen 100% of the time and I am having no problems with messages getting to me from anyone, be they friends, 2 factor authentications, opentextonline.com, whatever. Of course I cannot know if I am missing messages that I do not know about, but at this point I seriously doubt this because anything and everything that I have tested has worked flawlessly. I was even willing to give up imessage on the phone as I see no benefit whatsoever to it, but as long as it's off on my computers everything seems to be working flawlessly. And frankly I cannot for the life of me even see why I would want messaging on my computers anyway, and even if I did I would much more likely be using something like Skype.

At this point, I hope they have fixed it in 14.3 but if they didn't, it really wouldn't make any difference to me.
 
This is honestly ridiculous. Its been weeks. If anybody replies to a message I send right away I will almost never see the response. Apples magic solution is to send you home and ask you to setup as new instead of restore which would take forever. Judging from responses above it won't even solve anything. Ive seen lots of annoying bugs over the years but nothing like missing messages. Terrible.
 
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