Messages on iPhone not appearing on Mac

Handoff Continuity Troubleshooting

Handoff Continuity Troubleshooting (2)

iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac using Continuity - Connect

SMS Relay - Set up and use –Yosemite/ iOS 8

SMS Relay - Set up and use –Yosemite/ iOS 8 (2)

Text messages forwarding

Thanks, unfortunately it not helped, I cannot add the iCloud id to iMessages in send&receive I can only see my phone number, when I click on "use you Apple ID for iMessages" I get the above error about not matched accounts.

In this guide said "On iPhone, go to Settings > Phone > Calls on Other Devices, then turn on Allow Calls on Other Devices"

but in my case I don't have the option "Allow Calls on Other Devices". I'm in the same wifi, bluetooth is on and even connected. I feel lost 😟

It doesn’t look like it is being addressed in the upcoming iOS 12.1.3 patch per Apple’s release notes:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ios_release_notes/ios_12_1_3_beta_2_release_notes

and this issue could actually be the iCloud services. iCloud can easily de-stabilize macoOS or iOS operations.... taking a fully working system inexplicably to its knees without any changes to the system by the owner.

Try turning all of your iMessages associated with your Apple ID off *after* turning off the iCloud storage of iMessage messages. Then turn iMessages back on making sure that none are linked to iCloud storage before doing so.

Mine is working again after having the same issue you show in the snapshot here.

Turning off (or on) iMessage storage in iCloud on iOS :

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532

Messages has considerably fewer pinwheels of death (PWOD sometimes called beach balls of death BBOD) lockups after turning off iCloud storage of messages too.

#ios #imessage #messages #pwod #bbod #lockup #freeze #unresponsive #macos #sms #text

Issue just spontaniously started with the update to iOS 12.1.2 which triggered problems with my iCloud account, including this. Got the message:

On the Mac and similar on my iPhone. It literally occurred after my iPhone rebooted at the end of the iOS 12.1.2 install.

Any solution to this? Spent days since Christmas repeating suggested steps trying to fix this for a family member and still doesn’t work. In my case it is a new iPhone XR that didn’t sync messages after setting up with iCloud backup using iOS Quick Start with old/new devices and same Apple ID.

Thank you for the suggestion. I tried it along with some variations and messages still doesn’t work. Messages written on the new device (iPhone XR) do show up on the old device immediately (iPad mini), however, the 4.6 GB of Messages my family member only has stored on the old device (iPad mini) and in iCloud won’t sync to the new device.

In the troubleshooting process I used “Disable & Delete” in iCloud Storage in iMessages and now iCloud only shows 5.2 MB of messages in iCloud (this only accounts for some new messages on the new device - iPhone XR). The 4.6 GB of messages on the old device (iPad mini) no longer appear to be stored in iCloud. I eventually used “Undo” the “Disable & Delete” but the 4.6 GB of messages still don’t appear in iCloud.

Although I did a complete backup of the old device (iPad mini) before setting up the new device (iPhone XR), I assume that the messages aren’t backed up or they would have been installed during the Restore from iCloud Backup process?

We have an urgency in our case as the old device (iPad mini) has a failing battery or another issue and won’t charge unless it is powered completely off. This has taken many days of troubleshooting in itself just to be able to charge it. This leaves a small window of time to get this troubleshooting done before the iPad mini battery runs out and I’m worried if it completely fails that al of the messages will be lost before I can sync them.

All ideas are welcome and appreciated even if I need to redo all of the other steps. Been spending Christmas break on this and would like to resolve it soon. Thanks again for the very good suggestion.

Thank you. Both good suggestions.

Unfortunately Apple Support couldn’t help. Senior specialist said that I can’t expect an iPad backup to restore correctly to an iPhone because the iOS is written differently. Told me that the display scales are different so photos and videos taken on an an iPad and backed up won’t restore to an iPhone. I asked why all of the apps transferred along with notes, contacts, calendar, etc. and was told that I was lucky that this worked. That was the explanation for why restoring a backup from iCloud didn’t work for Photos and iMessages.

As far as why iMessages and Photos won’t just sync from iCloud onto the new device anyway (since we use iMessages and Photos in the cloud) there is no explanation for iMessages and I may hear back from the engineers sometime after the new year. iMessages were all in the cloud but wouldn’t sync to the new device, however, iMessages created on the new device do sync to the old device.

One thing I learned is that Photos in iCloud does seem to be working correctly. This issue is that not all of the photos from the iPad have been pushed to iCloud. All of the photos that were uploaded from the old device to iCloud Photos are synced on the new device. Not clear why all photos weren’t pushed to the cloud from the old device. This also doesn’t explain why all 4.6 GB of iMessages in the cloud wouldn’t sync to the new device though. They were all in iCloud and just wouldn’t sync.

An iTunes backup is another good point. In my situation I have an obstacle. I bought a MacBook Pro with the touchbar. I don’t use it much anymore because it is buggy and the touch bar went haywire and flashes constantly and it is very irritating. My hard drive is 500 GB, so backing up just my and some family members iOS devices alone used nearly all of the hard drive. I had to move our photo library to an external drive. There isn’t enough room to backup this family member’s device to my MacBook Pro so I would need more storage.

I looked into doing a backup of the device to an external hard drive but once it got into command prompts and changing paths and other technical things I dropped it. If there is a simpler way to backup to an external drive I suppose I could look into that again. The reason I pay the $10 a month for iCloud for our family to backup to is because I looked at it as the rough equivalent to backing up our iOS devices to an external drive. I can look more into this.

If if I get any info that is helpful I will post. Otherwise may just have to erase the phone and setup as new and see if things work a second time. Otherwise thanks for the suggestions. I’m exhausted.

This is the error message that I previously posted.

Looks like we have similar issue, it started to happen probably after I updated my Mac mini OS, I thought that something was broken while upgrade, but now I have new MacBook and the problem is not related to broken files of my Mac mini.

Recommend backing the iPad up to a Mac or PC in iTunes. It is suppose to backup the Messages data as well. This could be your fall back position while you work out the problems experienced with Messages sync across devices.

Told me that the display scales are different so photos and videos taken on an an iPad and backed up won’t restore to an iPhone.

That strikes me as a little odd. It suggests that the photos could not be transferred between the devices which is simply not true. Cloud sharing, AirDrop, Email, Messages, all transfer photos nicely between all of our iPhones and iPads, all screen sizes... made no difference.

I used to have a Mac mini sitting in the house setup with iTunes. My iPhones would automatically backup to that Mac mini when they were in the screen lock and powered (idling). This worked great for years and I am very tempted to go back to it if it were not for the file system problems in macOS losing data. (search your hard disk for 0 KB files...)

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