Messages frozen and crashes on iOS 17.5.1

Hello,

I might have a solution.

This happened to me before I enrolled into the iOS beta testing programme.

I’m not trying to convince you to enrol yourself, but all you need to do is…

1. Go into your settings app
2. Go into your Apple ID settings
3. Find your iCloud
4. Tap ‘iCloud Backup’
5. Tap ‘[your name]’s iPhone
6. Check that Messages is switched on.
7. If it is, go back
8. Tap ‘Back Up Now’
9. After your back up has been completed, uninstall and reinstall messages.

I also had the same exact problem both on iPhone 15 pro & iPad Pro, both were running IOS/iPadOS 17.5.1. My solution was to update the OS to the latest Public Beta. hope this helps!

[Edited by Moderator]

It is caused by your Apple Watch. Delete it from find my, and your your Apple account using your iPhone. Reset the watch.

Your messages app will now work, and you can link the watch again.

Same issue, i have to restart 5+ times a day. I turned off focus and havent had an issue yet, but it would be nice to have Apple say they are aware and investigating....not sure what causes it to lock up but it hard locks....also my watch is out of sync as well. It gets late notifications like texts or calls and ringing is out of sync as well.

Tell me how many devices do you have, watch? phone? pad? mac? And you are 100% sure that you logged out of all of them. And you waited the full 4 hours with everything logged out? That's the only way for the IDS registration system to release your account. It would be very strange for you to get two corrupted sessions in a row, but it is possible. Try it again.

Turning off stolen device protection seems to be the only thing that’s had any effect. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s truly remarkable that there’s been now acknowledgement of the scale of this issue.

> On the Lock Screen when a message is received, Tap and long press, a window opens to reply! Reply to the message sent it and then you can access your messages as normal!

This fixed it for me!

I didn't even have Focus on, but figured I'd try turning it on, then off. Seemed to fix everything like magic. Puzzling but, I'll take it.

TurningPurple wrote:

WHAT WORKED: as another poster said, turning off FOCUS in Messages )Settings) seemed to work.

Do you mean Settings>Messages?

Tried this and the other fixes mentioned here. Nothing works, however i did restart again and remove all apps from standby state, restarted again and its working, no idea how long it will last.

Same exact issue since latest update on my 12 pro max and wife on her 11. Kid also on their 11 having same issue. Can’t even go into settings app messages section. Locks there too. Messages fail to send. Can no longer get into iMessage at all … just hangs @ white screen

so frustrating. First time having issues with messages since my iPhone 3G lol

hope they can fix or get some work around

imessage is completely unusable. Had to setup my wife and kids on WhatsApp just to message argh

wife auto-updated first to 17.5.1 and had issues immediately. My phone was good until it too did the auto update overnight and then bam issues immediately morning of update. So definitely an iOS update issue.

iMessage still works on my MacBook and on kids MacBook no issues

lesson learned. Turn off auto updates

Update!

I noticed that many here are having multiple devices, just like me. So I did the following:

1. force quit all apps on both devices.
2. turn off both devices
3. turn on only one device

immediately received a bunch of notifications and able to read messages.

let me know if this works for you too - and also if anyone experiences this without having multiple devices (even on Mac)

update again 5 minutes later… back to square one. Crashes with only one device started. Getting sick of this.

i have the new 15 pro and new iPad Air and both of the have this message issue. Was on the phone with tech-support for an hour with Apple and with my carrier ~ it is the new software update. This iOS 17.5.1 has a major glitch with the messaging on phones and iPad’s, I don’t think I will be updating my Apple MacBook until this is fixed in fear that that will also stop working. No one has yet to find a solution. They just want you to keep factory resetting your phone, settings, etc. over and over because there is no solution. This is horrible part about updating to the latest iOS, and if you don’t it starts disabling features and connections, forcing you to do the update only to find out that the update has so many glitches itself. A lot of my friends have now switched to Android because there’s just so many issues these days with Apple phones, updates and battery. Apple is not what it used to be when Steve Jobs was around sadly, they’re slowly resembling and copying android interfaces and glitching in the process. Apple, you needs to read these messages and provide us a solution ASAP

I’m seeing the same issue, and I noticed it happened almost immediately after I used my Mac for the first time in a while. I can’t say if I’ve used it since my iPhone updated to 17.5.1 or not, but as soon as messages appeared to try and sync between the two the issue started.

I’m going to try and sign out from my Mac on iMessage to see if it makes a difference

My messages seems to be working again now for last 24 hours. I cleared the unread messages on my Mac and now the iPhone is working.