Voicemail Playback Not Working - iPhone X

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DannyBoy1951 Author

Level 1

8 points

Voicemail Playback Not Working - iPhone X

Pre-ordered a brand new iPhone X on Friday, 10/27; received it on Tuesday, 11/14. Everything seemed to work fine until someone left me a voicemail. When I pressed the 'play' button it changed to the 'pause' button but then nothing else happened. There was no movement along the progress bar, the times on each side of the progress bar didn't change, and there was no sound being played. Then the 'pause' button changed BACK to the 'play' button with nothing else having been done. So voicemail playback is not working. On a brand new iPhone X that has never been dropped.

Took my iPhone X down to the Apple store on a Friday night and they spent close to 1.5 hours on it. They DID manage to play back two of my voicemails but when I got home an additional phone call from my wife failed to play back. So I returned on Saturday morning and they performed a 'clean' reset/restore. I drove home, confident the problem had been solved.

It hadn't.

So on Saturday night, I drove down to Verizon Wireless and they spent about an hour trying to fix it. One of the things they did was to replace the SIM card in my phone and it still failed on voicemail playback, an indication that it was the iPhone X that was at fault. So I went BACK to the Apple store on Sunday and they replaced the iPhone X with another iPhone X.

And voicemail playback failed to play.

I have searched the internet for solutions and have tried every one of them. Multiple times. The guy at Verizon said that Apple services its own voicemails, that is, Verizon does not.

Please pass this request on to the engineers at Apple as i suspect there is a bug/flaw in either the new iPhone X or the latest operating system, 11.1.2.

Thanks in advance,

DannyBoy1951

iPhone X, iOS 11.1, Carrier = Verizon Wireless

Posted on Nov 27, 2017 8:28 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Shawn988

Level 1

14 points

Dec 16, 2017 6:58 PM in response to DannyBoy1951

I had the same issue wouldn’t play I tried this and it worked for me

Go to general, accessibility, turn off hearing aid compatibility

This also fixed my video calling on whataspp fb messenger and my voicemail

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Answer 2

DMD0961

Level 1

4 points

Dec 17, 2017 8:54 AM in response to Shawn988

Shawn - You are a lifesaver! Thank you so much for this tip. It fixed my phone which was having the exact problems described here. In case it is relevant, I do have hearing aids paired to my phone, Oticon OPN minirites.

I have been having this issue since I got my X, and the "Genius's" have been no help. I called 800myApple, and they had me restore to factory defaults (which also meant I had to re-enter app passwords, etc. - a real pain), and the reset did nothing to fix the problem. I then went to visit a "Genius Bar", and after waiting 30 minutes (past my appointment time) and another 45 minutes of the tech fiddling with the phone, no solution. The technician was very nice but no help at all.

Many, Many thanks!

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Answer 3

ddhatfi

Level 1

9 points

Dec 20, 2017 11:42 PM in response to Shawn988

That didn't work for me. I'm still having the same problem, even after telling the phone to "forget" my hearing aids completely.

Thanks for the good suggestion, though. Looks like it worked for a few folks, anyway!

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Answer 4

Jan 12, 2018 2:27 PM in response to DannyBoy1951

I had this problem of voicemails not playing. In fact, no greeting could be recorded. I spent 4 hours at various levels of support with AT&T to check provisioning. They even brought Apple support on the line. We reset, reloaded and did just about everything including replacing the SIM card. The conclusion was that it was an IOS problem, not an AT&T problem. I followed this up with Apple's top tier support who worked directly with engineering. They, of course, were convinced that it was an AT&T problem or a hardware problem with my new iPhone X. They followed up by sending me a new iPhone X. After changing SIM cards and loading the new iPhone X from my iCloud backup the problem remained. The new iPhone X would not play voicemail nor record a greeting. I then started going through every configuration option ( all of which were the default settings ) and found the issue.

Here it is - in the Settings menu go to the General menu then to the Accessibility menu. You will find two settings that are most likely set to ON. They are Phone Noise Cancellation and Hearing Aid Compatibility. This is a default setting from Apple. It is also an impossible setting because they are mutually exclusive. They both can't be on at the same time but something in the Apple IOS distribution kit sets them into a faulty configuration. Turn off Hearing Aid Compatibility ( just for grins try turning it back on - you can't because you'll get an error message ). Go to Visual Voicemail. You can probably play messages now. If not, power the phone off and on and voicemail and greeting recording should work.

I then went back to my original iPhone X and found the same configuration problem. I simply turned off Hearing Aid Compatibility and I could play all of the voicemails over the wifi connection ( the SIM card was in the other phone ). So this is NOT a carrier problem. It is a default ( or random ) settings problem with some IOS distributions.

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