No sound notifications for text messages after iOS 26 update

After contacting support, the agent was able to tell me that this is a known issue for the engineers. It sounded like there were several cases with the exact same issue, and that toggling the side switch was the only known current “fix”. Though temporary if the phone is restarted.

What’s happening for me and likely you too is that every time I restart my phone, which is every morning since it’s off while I sleep, is that the phone goes back into silent mode. It seems to be a glitch on older phones without the ‘show in status bar’ option and/or without the action button. My iPhone 13 has the switch on the side instead of a button. I am going to try the resetting all settings option or call apple support.

Since I updated the o iOS 26, and the first patch release, the sound alert on received messages is intermittent. Sometimes I get a sound some time I don't. I spend a half hour with a genius at the apple store. Nice guy, but the problem persisted. The next day I visited Verizon and upgraded from iphone 13 to 17. Nice phone. However, I have the same problem.

Let's all hope that the next update to iOS 26 will address the problem. It's MORE than annoying.

Thanks.

Ian

LouD86 wrote:

What’s happening for me and likely you too is that every time I restart my phone, which is every morning since it’s off while I sleep, is that the phone goes back into silent mode. It seems to be a glitch on older phones without the ‘show in status bar’ option and/or without the action button. My iPhone 13 has the switch on the side instead of a button. I am going to try the resetting all settings option or call apple support.

If I understand what you're saying, are you suggesting you power your phone OFF at night while you sleep? WHY? This is not best practice, for sure. What you should be doing is plug your phone in to charge when you go to bed at night, leaving it on its charger all night every night. With optimized battery charging and connected to Wifi, your phone will back up nightly, so you can never lose more than a few hours worth of data, should something go wrong. And if you don't want to be disturbed while sleeping, use Sleep Focus or programmed Do Not Disturb --> Turn on or schedule a Focus on iPhone - Apple Support

Because it’s my preference? Simple as that.

Back to the thread issue: Resetting all settings did not work. This definitely seems like a hardware difference issue between phone models on iOS 26.0.1

I will be calling Apple support next.

I had this on my old iPhone 13 and on my new iPhone 17. Sometimes I get the sound notification and sometimes I don't. I can't find any reason for this. I went to the Apple store and they didn't have a solution. I hope the folks at Apple spend some time tracking down the bug.

Do either of you wear Apple Watch?