My text message field have a grey bubble with 0:00

Others have reported they got rid of it by going to Settings >Messages and turning Show Subject on and then later back off again.

Worked for me. Thanks

I Had the same issue and I reset the phone by holding in the side on/off button and home button for 15 sec and the phone reset and no issue.

I have tried changing the word count option and the subject field option. It works for a little while but when I go back into messages the gray box is back.

Would be nice to hear of a fix from an Apple tech.

This is getting annoying, didn't happen until it updated to IOS 9

IPhone 6 IOS 9

WWorked for me thanks

Having the same problem which can be cleared temporarily by any of the methods mentioned but comes back at random

Only since iOS 9. Obviously a bug which Apple need to solve!

I see that you are experiencing an issue where your text entry field in the Messages app is being obscured by a gray bar. I would like to suggest that you first update to iOS 9.0.1, which was released today, and see if the issue is resolved by this update. If the issue is still present, you should go to your Messages settings and toggle the “Show Subject Field” setting. Simply turning this on, returning to your Messages app, then returning to the Settings to turn off the field again should resolve the issue:

---(Re: Grey box overlapping my texting keyboard with 0:00 )

found this answer under another discussion asking the same Q as you. This worked perfect for me... But I didn't turn my phone off I just went straight to settings and did exactly what this said and Yay!! No grey box in the way!

Thanks for your reply and various methods will remove the box temporarily but it returns at random !!

One can also use return twice and type in the message.

You refer to iOS 9 which has since had two updates and was the cause of the problem !

Can you advise me if you are able to solve the problem or shoud I look for a more reliable phone ?

There is an update out today (iOS 9.1) that may permanently fix the issue with the gray text box.