Messages frozen and crashes on iOS 17.5.1

Tried this. So far so good. I saw that focus button and thought that couldn’t be the culprit. I then saw your post and tried it. Thank you for the tip!!

(turn off the focus in message settings)

I was wondering if anyone else was having this issue. This is AWFUL! I also went to Apple Store and they have no idea how to fix. I have an iPhone 14 Pro Max and have never had any issues until now. I’ve tried factory resets, and hard resets. Only temporarily fixes it!

2 out of 5 of our phones are having this issue as well. iPhone 15 and 15 ProMax with AT&T service.

I tried all the steps that were suggested in previous posts and none work for more than a minute. iMessage comes through Wi-Fi extremely delayed.

so frustrated. was having this jussie no my iPhone 12 Pro Max, along with some other issues. was due for an update and thought hey, maybe getting a newer phone will solve this. i am now having the same issue with my brand new iPhone 15 Pro on 17.5.1, can’t even open message settings.

Same here... I've tried restarting which worked the first day, resetting which worked yesterday and today I tried restart, reset, log out and nothing makes any difference today which is very frustrating since messages are kind of important when you're trying to sell a house! Come on Apple do better by us and get this fixed asap!!

Update: I did a full factory reset on my 14 Pro Max with 17.5.1 and as of right now messages and everything are working. I will see how long it lasts and report back but hopefully a fix is released very soon.

Same. Started the day after my iPhone 14 Pro upgraded to 17.5. Took it to the store and the technician ran diagnostics, everything hardware and software is fine. he blamed my VPN and said there were known issues with VPN and 17 since September 🤷‍♂️. uninstalled VPN reset and rebooted in the store to no avail. His suggestion was to then set up the phone as a new device, but I have older contacts not in the cloud and so I opted to restore a backed up version prior to 17.5 downloading. No issues now.

100% related to 17.5 causing messenger to slow then lock completely.

This is getting worse and worse. Now even a third phone in the family is confronted with this issue.

Now all had to switch to WhatsApp. Was this the intent, Apple?

Is there any fix in the making Apple?

Pro tip: if you experience this on a Mac and it crashes, write a detailed bug report in the Problem Report for Messages” window to Apple. The MacOS development team read _everything_ you write in there. Everything.

they like to know what you’ve tried, what your configurations is, steps to reproduce, and how often does it happen 9/10 times for me.

I’m including a link to this thread in my report as well.

I've been dealing with this for weeks. Reset network settings, reset all settings, restored phone from backup, set up phone as new, it keeps coming back. Messages extremely slow to send / sync, and often fail on linked mac and ipad. iPhone now in a complete crash loop where it doesn't work at all.

Called Apple Support. May have fixed things. Here’s how.

Settings > General > Transfer or Reset Phone (scroll to the bottom to find it) > Reset > Reset All Settings.

It won’t wipe your phone completely, but you’ll have to adjust your settings after it restarts including display settings, Face ID, credit cards in your wallet, etc). The CC restoration was faster than expected.

after this I’ve not been dealing with an unusable messages app or getting frozen messages settings. 16 hours later and I’m still issue free.

Wow, 16 hours issue free. Come back when it is a week or two.

Unfortunately, done that, did not work. It is just a temporary fix, not permanent.

Without a software fix by Apple we will see no improvement on this end.

I get the vibe there are multiple issues at play. When I was on the phone with a support supervisor they had me check this as well. It didn't fix my messages app issues. The question seemed out of left field, but seeing your experience with it I understand why they asked me the question.

Hello all,

I also have had issues with the messages app, same as everyone else here so I won't go into the laundry list of 'fixes' that I attempted, the same as everyone else here. I contacted Apple Support a week ago to see if they could help. Of course, the person I spoke with also had no idea what would cause the issues because he'd not spoken to anyone else about it and it was new to him (yeah right). I told him to read the message boards because this was a widespread problem and I was shocked to hear he'd not already gotten requests for help. Anyway........whatever. He asked me to do a little troubleshooting, to which I said I had already done all the things and I wasn't going to drag it out by going through his list of fixes. He then forwarded me to a specialist. Long story short, she ran a program on my phone to get data analytics to send to the engineering department, along with a screenshot of my Iphone storage. She said she'd get back to me by today. Well, my storage was about 3/4 full and I wondered if maybe my messages had too many large attachments (pics, videos) this past Tuesday I reviewed them and deleted a bunch, and I mean it was a lot, of videos and pics I had sent via text message over the last 4 years. Messages app still didn't work. Until Wednesday afternoon. All of a sudden, now I receive and can send messages! And the messages are forwarding to my iPads as well, which I was also having issues with. No issues since. I haven't heard back from support yet today. Not sure if I will. But at any rate, its working as it was before. I don't know if engineering was able to do something on their end without me knowing, which I don't think is possible since she had to get my permission to access my phone to do the diagnostics. But maybe it was my messages storage being overloaded with large attachments. I would suggest trying the same thing, maybe its as simple as that. I noticed today that I have a TON of storage on my phone now, as in I'm only using 1/3 of the total amount. I apologize for the long message, but I hope this helps everyone and if you're still having issues, just call support and tell them you need to speak with a specialist.

Good luck to all, this is absolutely frustrating and I'm hoping I have no further issues. I will report back if I do.

I have over 1TB of iCloud storage free and about 800GB free on my phone. This isn’t a storage quota problem, though it may be hitting some internal limit somewhere. The only thing that’s helped so far (temporarily) is a full restore of the phone, and I’ve now had to do that three times in the past three weeks.