iPhone not getting text notifications

This absolutely fixed it for me (I also had to manually turn off do not disturb, since it’s during my normal DND time) Text messages in both directions, to and from my wife’s phone and mine, are now showing, even with screen turned off and iPhone locked.

I spent 12 hours today trying every combination of settings, plus 30 minutes on the phone with Apple, and reading through every thread I could find.

I never even noticed a little “i“ but once I checked both phones—one on iOS 10 where it was labeled “do not disturb“ and mine on iOS 11 where it was listed as “hide alerts“— and slid the buttons to off, iMessage notifications are now properly appearing.

Thank you markduganjr !

No - you cannot say it will fix it for everyone- not cool of you to say that. it may have fixed it for *your* old ipad or something, but this is absolutely NOT APPLICABLE for my iPhone 8 with ios 11. I do not have a "hide alerts". I have a "do not disturb". and it is turned off. The best I have managed to accomplish is get text message alerts on my iWatch 2 as long as I leave the iWatch 2 unlocked and am wearing it. No way at all will I get alerts on the iPhone 8 if it is screen off and locked. This ***** so bad I am at the point where I need to see if i can roll back to 10??

Can you imagine if this gets talked about on CNBC? Apple releases a major ios version that DISABLES ALL TEXT ALERTS on your iPhone, permanently? how is that going to go over with investors? Why does Apple not care about such a major, major goof?

If you would bother to read what I wrote, I said “it absolutely fixed it for me“. I said nothing about your iPhone 8. This worked perfectly on two iPhone 7 and my ”old“ iPad Air 2 running iOS 11.0.2.

I suspect you are not looking in the correct spot for the “Hide Alerts” slider button, but I would hate to steer you wrong, so I’ll leave it for you to figure out. Best of luck.

I’m having the same issues. I’m not getting any notifications on my texts. & I do have my text notifications turned on. Sometimes hours will go by before I even receive a text someone sent me. I’ve tried disabling Bluetooth (which we shouldn’t even have to do) & it’s still the same thing. This has been beyond frustrating. I have a 6s, btw.

This is the solution that worked for me (iPhone 6):

Settings - Notifications - Messages

- ‘show as banners’ setting On -

- change ‘temporary’ to ‘persistent’

My banners were set to temporary, which was new.

All working now

Replying to the entire thread (not just to KMA82):

Way back on September 23, I offered my own experience here. To summarize: text messages, which I had opted not to appear on the lock screen because for security reasons, we’re not generating any notifications at all. I submitted a bug report to Apple.

I have solved the problem in my own case as follows: I switched back on the “Show in Lock Screen“ option for Messages notifications (which I had deliberately turned off), and enabled the new “Show Previews —> When Unlocked” feature at the top of the Notifications settings. Now I get all my notifications on the lock screen, but nothing more than an indication that there is something to be seen, not the content. A simple TouchID unlock is all it takes to be able to view them fully and act upon them (so my security needs are met).

This is mode of operation my help others with a similar problem. I hope it does.

In your original post you did not bother to list what devices you "fixed". But at least now I got you to step up and leave some proper detail (iPhone 7, iPad Air 2), which may be of help for others with the exact same devices and this issue.

So I am not looking in the "correct spot" huh? Sheer brilliance. FYI- There is no "hide alerts" in ios11 on iPhone 8, it is called "do not disturb". Maybe it is still labeled "hide alerts" on the older iPhones or ipads.

What we have here is called a software bug, not user error.

From what I gather there seems to be no magic "across the board fix" for this problem, that applies to all devices running ios 11. Some things will work for some devices, but overall it is still not optimal. Apple needs to step up and patch this, it is the only way to uniformly correct this huge issue. Who wants to drop $1k on a new iPhone 8 or X that is not able to receive alerts when locked / screen off? Can you imagine all the affected ios device users out there, suddenly wondering why they are no longer getting alerts?

For me this issue occurs when the phone has been idle for a long time so anything that wakes it up fixes it until it becomes idle again. I have done all the suggestions offered here as well as some not listed. Have called Apple Care multiple times and even been in the store once to talk to a technician. My last call to Apple Care got me through to a Senior Manager who has escalated this issue to their engineers. Please continue to send feedback to Apple so they realize that a lot of people have this issue.

I think it could be a problem with the way do not disturb works. Your meant to get a half moon show up in the top bar when it’s on and that stops tones in locked screen. The half moon doesn’t always appear. I wouldn’t say it’s a problem with being turned on and off I would say it might be a deeper iOS problem. Not sure how to report this to Apple hope it makes it way to them from here

mikee316 wrote:

I think it could be a problem with the way do not disturb works. Your meant to get a half moon show up in the top bar when it’s on and that stops tones in locked screen. The half moon doesn’t always appear. I wouldn’t say it’s a problem with being turned on and off I would say it might be a deeper iOS problem. Not sure how to report this to Apple hope it makes it way to them from here

I've never observed (nor seen any previous reports of) the crescent moon not appearing when DND is turned on. It is possible to hide the alerts for individual text conversations. That will not result in an icon.

If you're seeing some anomalous behavior with DND, you should start by doing some basic troubleshooting. Start by restoring from a back up.

Having had a nice long chat with support I did loads of investigating. With Bluetooth Off tones were heard on the lock screen with Bluetooth on and Apple Watch linked no tones are heard on lock screen. Not sure if it’s something to do with the watch linking. Apple engineers are looking into the problem.

has been discussed previously, for some simply turning off Bluetooth completely from Settings fixes it (myself included) and for others turning off Bluetooth has no effect. sometimes I have to turn off Bluetooth in Settings, then also go into Airplane mode and back out. then notifications will resume.

it should not much, if anything to do with the watch, not everyone has a watch linked; rather seems to be with BT on vs off (plus potentially some other mystery factor).

glad Apple is getting more exposure to troubleshooting this serious flaw. one might think the 4 pages of discussion should be getting noticed by now as well.

Do you know how long you have been having the problem is it just from the ios11 update??

Yeah I think the BT issue on /Off is the issue.

Not sure if it has something to do with the new do not disturb settings.

Maybe it thinks you connected to a car if something is to the BT. so one of the options is no tones on lock screen

I know for a fact my issue is with BT being connected to anything; car, headphones, speaker. When connected to anything via BT, the notification alert sound is pushed through the connected devices speaker instead of out of the phone speaker.

This can be a problem in the car since if you're not streaming from the phone and listening to the radio the sound doesn't push through to anywhere and you'll miss notifications. For headphones, if they're connected but not in your ears you'll not hear anything either.

Since this is my first time back into iOS in 4+ years I'm not sure if its supposed to work this way or not, but its truly annoying and the cause of missing plenty of important notifications.

After many attempts on other suggestions, I tried yours. Works a treat, I don’t know if this is only an intermittent fix or whether it’s a permanent solution, I would suggest anyone reading your reply would give this a try as it has worked for you, and now me. Thank you for your input .