iPhone message tone notifications inconsistent

An update: bluetooth was the culprit in my case. Apple's fakakta decision to only disconnect bluetooth and wifi from the control center, not disable them, muddied the waters. Going into Settings and truly turning off bluetooth got my audio text notifications back 100%. I stream music daily via bluetooth so this is a pain to implement.

One thing I have noticed is that my iPhone 7, after upgrading to iOS 11, and iOS 11.0.1, will receive and properly display notifications if the screen is unlocks, but it will not if the screen is locked. The screen stays off, not notification sounds, nothing to indicate that an alert has arrived. I have also noticed that if my phone has bluetooth turned off (in settings) then it does display notifications properly when the phone is locked. I'm not sure why bluetooth is preventing lock screen notifications from working properly, but that seems to be the case for me.

Middle of the night, finally realised what is happening: you don't get a message tone if the conversation is open. Close the conversation so that you only see the headers, and the tone sounds just fine. On the iPad that means having a New Message open so that existing conversations aren't visible. I can go to bed now.

I know this might sound obvious, but I just noticed that there’s a “hide alerts” feature in messages that appears if you swipe right on the conversation. I was wondering why texts from my wife didn’t have a tone play...I think this may be why. Later I noticed that a crescent moon appears to next to the conversation when “hide alerts” is enabled. See photo.

I was also frustrated by this problem. The suggestion regarding the special feature in IOS 11 to HIDE ALERTS for a single conversation was the answer. Swipe left on the conversation just like DELETING and you will see a new second feature. it will say either Hide or Show Alerts. If it says SHOW you have inadvertently done a HIDE before. I'm not sure how it happened because the person that it happened for was someone I would never try to DELETE, and this is the first I have heard of this feature. Sort of a Do Not Disturb for a single contact.

I had the same problem as the original poster. My text tone alerts did not work when my phone was locked. Turning off bluetooth did fix the problem. However, I was able to trace the real issue to having my Mac being logged into Messages. When I logged out of Messages on my Mac, then I get text tone alerts on my phone's lock screen with bluetooth enabled. I believe then that there is some issue with Handoff (the bluetooth factor) and Messages on macOS causing the alert to be squelched. I rarely used Messages on my Mac anyway since I generally have my phone, so this is a reasonable workaround for me.

My mom just had this issue.

At first it was just car play that didn't make any WhatsApp notification sound. Then the phone stopped making WhatsApp notification sounds but she was still getting notification sounds on her Apple watch.

We tried deleting WhatsApp and reinstalling but that didn't work.

We tried resetting WhatsApp notification settings but that didn't work.

We checked iPhone notification settings and they were all fine.

We checked she wasn't connected to any Bluetooth other than her Apple watch but that was all normal too.

Then I found this thread but since she uses bluetooth constantly either to connect her iphone to car play or her Apple watch, switching Bluetooth off to fix the bug was not an option.

I thought about checking Do Not Disturb. Her "do not disturb while driving" was set to Manual so that was good and she didn't have "do not disturb" on, nor did she have it scheduled.

Finally I thought since everyone on this thread had issues with not getting notifications when phone was locked that, even though she had do not disturb off and unscheduled, I would try and set the settings under "Silence" within "do not disturb" to "Always" instead of "While iPhone is locked". For good measure we switched "do not disturb" on and then of again.... And hey presto.... It worked, we get notification sounds again!

It was a complete shot in the dark but give it a try it might work for you too.

Good luck!

Use Do Not Disturb on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Folks for those of you facing the issue where Bluetooth is the is the cause of lost notification sounds here is a fix.

It seems the issue is caused by one of your stored/saved Bluetooth devices. This can easily be resolved by removing/forgetting/deleting one device at a time from your list of Bluetooth devices and sending yourself a test message after removing each device to see if it solves the problem of notifications. Eventually you’ll delete one of the devices and find suddenly you’re receiving sounds notifications again and identify the culprit. Then you can try adding yet device again to the list of stored Bluetooth devices and see if it the sounds keep working or not.

This work d for me and turned it one particular Bluetooth device I rarely used but was stored on the list in my phone was somehow stopping the notification sounds. After reading the device I am still receiving the sounds so the solution worked really well.

I have an iPhone X. I’ve called Apple Support numerous times dating all the way back to November 2017 when I first got the phone, because it would only intermittently emit a text tone. I backed it up and restored it as a new phone, but it made absolutely no difference. Apple finally replaced the phone for me, and when I got home from the Apple store, I found that the problem affected the new phone. I read somewhere on this site that if the text conversation is open, the phone won’t play a text tone. It will make a “whoosh“ sound, but it’s only audible if you’re looking at the phone. But if you use the arrow that’s on the left of the message screen and close out the conversation so that you only see who the text is from and one line of writing, the next time someone texts you, it will play a text tone. It’s somewhat inconvenient, but it seems to remedy the problem.

It's a bit disturbing that it was working (I was getting a tone and vibrate when I got an e-mail message) and within an hour with it just sitting beside me, it started vibrate only. All settings were correct, if I went to Sounds and Haptics the sound was correctly set and I could tap it and hear it without issue (so not a speaker issue or a tone issue), and I never have Bluetooth on, but I followed the first rule of IT: reboot. I turned it off and back on again and it's working again. This is a brand new phone, less than a week old on iOS11.3, so I'm not sure why this started and it makes me a bit nervous for a new phone to do this. Given that this seems to be an issue for a lot of people, and since this is my only phone so I depend on it, I would think that Apple would do more digging into why this is happening since iOS 11 was released. I had it happen on my old iPhone as well (but I blamed it on age and rebooted each time it happened), so it has to be an issue with the operating system. I started seeing it with iOS 11, but it's still going on in iOS 11.3.

I also had this problem. Later I found that it was because my iPhone 7 was connected to a Bluetooth speaker. Just turn off Bluetooth or disconnect from that speaker. The problem would be resolved. Hope it helps!

For me, I had a set oh Bluetooth earbuds that stayed, “connected” even though they where no longer in use or anywhere near the phone. I noticed headphone icon upper right had corner of screen.

Resolved my issue

I got an iPhone 8 Plus iOS 11.2.1and none of my previous fixes on the other phones would work so I spent a lot of time trying to find the solution on so many sites and what it came down to in the end was so simple. Turn your Bluetooth off and back on.

Tried everything listed here and a few other message boards. The only think that worked was turning Bluetooth off. I tried turning it back on and discovered that I would not get a notification from my lock screen again. I even checked in Bluetooth to see if I was connecting to anything such as one of the cars, speakers, sound bar, etc and I was not. This is very frustrating. I hope Apple fixes this at some point. I do like my new $1,150. iPhone X but for this price they need to get rid of that notch (ok, can’t do that until next phone) and fix this issue with lock screen notifications while Bluetooth on. Apple- please listen.