iphone voicemail issues iOS 10

You must have Visual Voicemail enabled on your Verizon account (or equivalent service from other carrier as appropriate). As of this post, it runs $2.99 per device. You can get to it via MyVerizon, My Plan & Services, My Products & Apps. The Visual Voicemail transcription service has been integrated into iPhone's core Phone app voicemail. A standalone Verizon Visual Voicemail app was previously required but this is no longer the case as of iOS 10.

Once you have enabled it, you must recycle the power (turn off, back on) on the affected devices.

Hey Pfack, that has nothing to do with it. Whether enabled or not, the software itself (on the iPhone) is NOT working. The voicemails open and quickly close. Unless you're good at reading subliminal messages, it's gone in the blink of an eye.

I had this identical issue for months until I got totally fed up with the workaround (calling my voicemailbox for messages - the "old" way) and finally sought out this forum thread yesterday. This was impacting my business and I'm sure it's equally frustrating for others too. I called Verizon and had a Level 1 Tech explain to me how the integration of Visual Voicemail into iOS 10 had taken place. Long story short - after disabling and re-enabling the Visual Voicemail Feature a few times (and power-cycling the phone after each individual toggle of that feature) all of the voicemail transcriptions now remain open when each one is touched. And I can actually listen to the voicemails without the transcription collapsing and stopping the playback, which was even more annoying. For me, I could live without the poor quality transcriptions but not being able to playback the message right on the device was a frustration that broke this camel's back.

To be clear on how I resolved this, while logged into MyVerizon, I disabled the Visual Voicemail feature and hit "save" to confirm its association from my device at the account level, restarted my iPhone 7, then repeated the process by re-enabling the feature on MyVerizon, saving to the account again, and then recycling the iPhone power once more. To be sure, I waited 10 minutes between each change and power recycle to ensure the network was aware of the change and had a chance to push that change down to my device.

So far the remedy seems to have "stuck" for me and I recommend others give it a try as I know the joy firsthand of having this feature function the way it is intended. And now for my cynicism. If this by chance ends up being a short-lived solution, rest assured I'll back on this forum in a heartbeat letting you all know and picking my torch back up.

Only the workaround. Go to Deleted Messages and the bottom of Voicemail, Clear one of the Deleted messages (just 1 because you want to save these). Go back to voicemail and they will play. You have to do this each time you open voicemail but it is better than dialing *86 then going through them sequentially via audio.

I found a weird workaround that seems to work. If I select a voicemail's "information" (round circle to the right with the "i" in it) I can see the phone accessing some data (indicated by the upper left next to LTE spinning). Once it finishes spinning I can go back and listen to that specific voicemail. A pain, but at least it works for now.

I had the same problem and was becoming infuriated by it. It was impacting my ability to communicate with clients and friends in a timely and effective manner. Then I sort of accidentally stumbled into what was a fix for me. I never realized it but all the VMs you ever delete are never really deleted until you scroll down to the bottom of your VM list and select the Deleted subfolder. You then have the option of 'Clear All'. Once I realized I had over 850 stale messages in there, I just deleted them all. This cured my problem immediately. I can imagine the system having to juggle this many items can goof up the whole VM folder.

I have the same issue and have had it since the Fall 2016. I tap on a voicemail and it instantly closes..I have to play this game at least 5 times to get it to stay open...then if I hit play, it closes...somedays it works half the time, somedays they are all light grey and I cant access them at all. This was with an ATT iPhone 6 Plus... I just got an iPhone 7 the other day, hoping to solve this terrible issue, and its doing the same thing. Ive never seen a transcription on my phone, but Ive seen it work flawlessly on countless others. I spent time at the genius bar, and they didn't have an answer, said it was a carrier issue..I then spent 90 minutes at ATT resetting/ powering up and down, 3 different SIM cards...same thing...Basically no one has a clue and they blame each other. Is this an IOS software bug or a carrier issue? I would suspect carrier, but Ive heard it happens on Verizon and the others as well. While all the Apps are cool, at the end of the day, its a $800 phone and the most important feature should work! Ive reset the network and password a gazzillion times. All old VMs are deleted. The phone has plenty of storage. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Tried the "delete all voicemails" multiple times. Actually deleted them ALL. At most, was a temporary fix--similar to the "reset network settings" solution. Please report back whether this works longer than a week.

I'm having same problem and spent hours on phone with Verizon and Apple. Apple had me reload phone 3 times and it did not resolve. They tried to tell me no problem. Found this thread and confirmed it's not me!

Here's two workarounds I've found:

1. Press voicemail, watch activity wheel on phone to stop spinning then press the message and it works. To summarize, press voicemail and wait 5+ seconds then the messages work.

OR

2. Put phone in airplane mode it works.

Those work for me! I hope they fix it and really upset how much time I've spent messing with this.

I was able to fix my issue by going into Greeting > and creating a custom greeting. Not sure if setting it back to default greeting would continue the same behavior. I just left it at a custom greeting.

My problem is that I set up my voicemail when I first got my 5s about a year ago and was recently told by someone trying to contact me that they couldn't leave a message. When I looked at it today, it wouldn't let me re-set up my voicemail. It keeps giving me an error. I've tried restarting my phone, resetting my phone, and resetting the voicemail password. None of which have worked. I don't want to have to spend several hours on the phone with my service company. Any other ideas?

yes this has to have something to do with the transcription.. and boy its annoying... luckily i don't get many VM's these days or i would be crazy. Hit play.. it plays for 10 seconds or so then stops. EVERY. TIME. I haven't listened to the full VM on the first time through in many months... dear god apple figure it out.

None of the workarounds work for me. I have yet to see a single transcription on my phone, yet all of my friends and clients display transcriptions all day long....When is the next software update? I suspect I'll download it and it will still have the same issue...Very frustrating..

Hi there, thanks for the suggestion. I did that to no Avail. I cant even listen to the most recent voicemail Ive gotten, it just flickers/ disappears every time I touch. There has never been a transcription on this 3 week old ATT iPhone 7. I'll take a video of it. Please Help

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I wish I could help, but you're the first person to describe exactly what my phone does. I finally changed my voicemail greeting to tell people to text or email me because voicemail doesn't work and no one has been able to fix it.