So I finally updated my iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPad Air 4 to iOS/iPadOS 17.5.1 (from 16) recently. (I know, I know. I’m slow to update OSes.) I was hoping that an annoyance with iMessage would have been resolved, but it’s still present.
I have iMessage active on both my iPhone and my MBP (2019 16", running Big Sur 11.7.10). I had had it turned off on my iPad because of a quirk: no matter what my notification settings for Messages was on my iPad, it always uses the settings from my iPhone, which include persistent banners and a notification sound. I don’t need this, because I already get the notification sound from my iPhone through my hearing aids, and I’m rarely away from my phone. So my settings on the iPad were temporary banners (so I can see who’s messaging me) and no sounds.
I could put up with this if it only happened while I was using the iPad when the messages actually arrived. It doesn’t. Whenever I wake my iPad, the last several iMessages I’ve received while the iPad was off or asleep each pop up a notification on the iPad, with sound and persistent banner, even though I’ve already read them on my iPhone or my MBP. (Reading them on the MBP instead of the iPhone doesn’t always clear the badge on my phone, but I can deal with that. That usually happens only with SMS messages, not iMessages.)
I had hoped that this behavior would go away when I updated to iPadOS 17, but nope, it’s still there. The iPad also seems to only get the iMessages, not the SMS messages; my MBP gets both, so I know it’s not simply from the iPad being Wi-Fi only.
The main reason I want iMessage turned on on the iPad is so I can share things from it via Messages. I may want to read and respond to messages on the iPad when I’m actively using it—I tend to do that on whichever device I’m using when the message comes in—but that’s secondary, and I don’t need the extra notifications. I’ve looked for a setting to change this behavior, but not found one yet.
Do you have messages in iCloud turned on for both your phone and iPad? Settings / Apple ID / iCloud and make sure that Message sync is turned on. This will sync whether you’ve read messages, deletions, etc.
It also sounds like you should turn off notifications on your iPad for messages in settings / notifications. That setting does not sync between iOS and iPadOS.
Yes, turning off the notifications completely kills them, but I don’t want that. I want the temporary banners so that I don’t have to pull out my phone to see who has messaged me when I’m actively using the iPad.
Well then turn off the sound in settings / notifications / messages / sounds - I have a “none” there. You can also turn off lock screen and Notification Center if you don’t need them and leave banners on.
You’re not understanding what I’m saying. I already have sounds turned off for Messages notifications on the iPad, and on for the iPhone. I’m still getting the sounds on both devices. The Settings on the iPad show what I want them to be, but it’s not using them except when I turn Messages notifications completely off on the iPad.
So again I’ll suggest that you change the text tone to “none”. Settings / notifications/ messages / sound and change it to “none”. (Not sure if it’s the same on iPadOS , but on iOS you can do the same at settings / sound & haptics / text tone and change it to “none” there.)
It does not sync this setting between devices. You can have different sound settings for iOS and iPadOS.
After a little bit of testing, I’ve gathered more information. The sound issue does not happen with SMS messages, something I couldn’t verify before since the iPad wasn’t getting the SMS messages. It happens only with iMessages.
This leads me to suspect something that I’m not quite willing to test. The person I get iMessages from the most is my spouse, and I have a custom sound set for them. Obviously, this is set in Contacts, which are synced across all my devices. I have few iMessage contacts (most of my friends use Android, for which I pity them), and most of them have custom sounds set.
The reason that I’m not willing to test this is that after upgrading to iOS/iPadOS 17, I discovered that the sound I use for my spouse, “Cosmic”, is no longer listed as an available alert sound. It still shows on their contact card, and it still sounds when I get messages from them, but I don’t think I’ll be able to reselect it if I remove it unless I can get it to show up in the list.
Since the sound is obviously still on my iPhone, as it still sounds, theoretically there should be a way to add it back to the list of alert tones, but I have yet to find one. So if someone can point me to a solution for that that actually works for me, I can then test whether the problem is specifically because I have a custom sound set for that contact, in which case I can confidently report it to Apple as a bug, because that shouldn’t invisibly override the “notification sounds off” setting.
If you have your spouse set to use emergency bypass, yes, it will override the no sound notification setting. It also overrides the mute switch on the iPhone, or turning sound off globally on the iPad. (Edit the contact and tap text tone to see if emergency bypass is turned on. There is a similar emergency bypass under the ringtone setting for the contact.)
If you sync contacts, that’s setting does sync between devices and overrides sound settings.
I once used emergency bypass for my wife and my kids but I’ve turned them all off - it was getting to be an issue when I was in a setting when I wanted sound off completely (funeral service, etc.) and now just have them set to bypass focus with a vibration alert (my devices are always set to silent and my watch is almost always on, so alerts tend to go there most.)
It already is. Always has been. The only place on my iPad that shows any sound set for Messages at all is in the Contact, for which I would have to turn off iCloud Contacts to change on only the iPad. That’s a high price to pay.
I’ve already said that I know these settings shouldn’t sync. None of these settings are supposed to sync except those in Contacts. Looking at the settings in question, they are clearly not syncing. But the behavior I’m getting is as if they are syncing. That’s why I called it an oddity and a potential bug.
Emergency Bypass is turned off for this and all other contacts. I’ve never turned it on. I don’t use Do Not Disturb or Focus modes, and against trend, I only turn my phone or iPad to silent when it matters. I have other notifications on each device that I want to hear the sounds for (notifications that are not going to be the same on both devices). This contact is set as an Emergency Contact, but that should only matter for sending emergency alerts, not receiving messages.
I also tested the Critical Alerts and Time Sensitive Notifications settings under the Messages notification settings. Made zero difference whether on or off, together or separately.
I have since turned on iCloud Messages on the iPad (it was already on on the iPhone and doesn’t appear in the list of iCloud apps on the MBP, but I had neglected to set it on the iPad). We’ll see if that addresses the issue of old notifications stacking up. If it does, that turns this problem from highly annoying to just mysterious.
Which is really kind of stupid. Comparing the “Classic” lists under ringtones and text tones, a seemingly random selection of the old tones are available for ringtones but not text tones. Meanwhile, every custom ringtone I’ve loaded is available for either. There’s little sense in keeping these sounds loaded and not making them available for only certain uses.
Is there a way to extract the sound file (either on the device or using my Mac), or has someone else done so and made it available online, so that I could then load it as a custom ringtone and thumb my nose at Apple here?
So I think I’d suggest turning off the custom sound for your wife’s texts from contacts and see if that resolves the issue.
Probably. I’ve created custom tones from the Garage Band app on my phone (the procedure should be searchable) so if you can’t search for and find the sound that you want in ringtone format, you might be able to create it that way.
You used to be able to do this with Apple’s built-in device sync, but this option disappeared some years ago, possibly when they replaced iTunes with Music and moved device syncing to the Finder. So now you need a third-party tool. I personally recommend iMazing, but it has a license fee that’s not cheap (currently $60 for a permanent license for up to 3 devices or $40 a year for a subscription license for up to 5 devices). I’m not aware of any free tools that do this, but I haven’t looked for one in a long time either, since I’ve been using iMazing for years.
The tool you use would upload them to your device as ringtones. iMazing can use any conventional audio file and convert them to the appropriate format, but other tools may not do this, in which case you would need to convert them before uploading. There are a number of tools that can do this conversion, but if they’re .m4a files, as the ones that were linked here are, you only need to change the filename extension from .m4a to .m4r.
Once you’ve done all this, the added tones will appear in the tone list when you are selecting a tone in Settings (or a contact-specific tone in Contacts), for any type of tone. They appear in a separate section from the built-in tones, and where exactly they appear is different in different places, but I have yet to find a place where you can pick a tone where they do not all appear.
It’s been a while since I did it, but as of a couple of years ago you could still USB connect the iPhone or iPad and drag a ringtone file into the device in the Finder.