Messages Notifications on iPhone 13 mini on iOS 18.1 (didn’t have this in 17 and earlier) are set to:
Allow: on
Immediate Delivery Critical and Time Sensitive: on
All styles of Alerts: selected
Style: Temporary
Sounds: Slide
Badges: on
Lock Screen Previews: when unlocked
Grouping: off
Customisations: all off
Face/Passcode allow when locked: Notification Center on
Somehow though new Messages do not generate:
Sound
Badge
or appear in Notification Center banners or lock screen Notification center.
I’ve tried: searching a wide variety of keywords online over many weeks; turning all this off and back on; turning off, rebooting, turning on, rebooting; and maybe other steps I can’t recall now.
Still no notifications occur. It’s slightly irritating, as I do online stuff that requires PINs by SMS at least a couple of times a week and I wait and wait for the sound and eventually wake/unlock the phone and the message is there.
Maybe or maybe not related is that PayPal lately needs two correct PINs before it logs me in.
Is there another switch in another setting somewhere that needs to be on?
Thanks and replying post-holiday weekend is quite all right!
Anyone? 
Are you seeing notifications from Messages on other devices connected to your Apple Account?
Are you getting notifications from other apps?
Thanks for the questions Mr. Engst,
things with Messages and notifications seems to be getting more and more fouled up.
Yesterday I tried multiple times to send a Note from a Mac on one Apple Acct to iPhone/MBAir on another Apple Acct, and it wouldn’t go thru. Tried sending just some letters, also didn’t go through at all. Didn’t work the other way either, but Messages/SMS from others do come through.
Logged both accounts out and in of iMessage, still doesn’t function.
I only allow a few apps to make notifications. Sky Guide for instance, works. Signal sometimes works while out and about, sometimes not. Sometimes I get batches of notifications from Signal messages over a time span when I get in the house and unlock the iPhone. (Location is only on for Find My iPhone).
But Messages on iPhone is consistently not Notifying, despite signing in and out, turning Notifications for it on and off, rebooting the device.
This is all new behavior since maybe 6 or more months ago on a previous iOS. I haven’t changed much in regard to Messages and notifications other than the iOS to 18.
Maybe there are some assumptions Apple makes about other linked settings that have to be on for this to work.
I came across something possibly similar recently (I don’t want to burden the Talk with a new Topic at the holidays), I was seeking a way to quickly, maybe thru a button action on iPhone, lock the iPhone. I have it set to auto lock after 5 minutes (I’m not often out in public where it could be lost or stolen).
I found several websites saying pushing the side button will Lock iPhone, but it merely turns off the display in my case. I ended up finding a Shortcut and Assistive Touch option that say Lock Screen and they actually do turn off display AND lock the device.
But the point of the story is that there are maybe sometimes assumptions made about how the device is set up and used when writing tips. As complex as iPhone now is, I can see how it would be difficult to give a tip like this and fairly concisely list all the connected conditions! Speaking of concise…
I never solved this one, just going to have to workaround it and manually check the apps often.
This week there was a cellular broadcast warning and I didn’t hear any sound although volume was up and the settings are set for it.
I had hoped updating to 18.2.1 would help but it didn’t.
The Signal App seems to work consistently, and Messages works sometimes.
In frustrations I tried a hail mary of turning off all notifications, turning off the iphone completely and leaving it off for a couple of hours, then rebooting and turning on Notifications as were previously set.
Subsequently i did get two Messages from senders over two days with audio and lock screen notification and an icon badge. This evening I checked again, sending a Message from Messages App on the mac to the iPhone. No audio notification. Woke the phone and a Notification message was on the lock screen and a garbled version of the alert tone played. App icon had a badge.
One new question occurs to me, there is a setting in Notifications > Messages > Lock Screen Appearance/Customise Notifications > Allow Notifications “Unknown Senders” on or off with no explanation what that means. I turned it on after the reboot and hard to say if it has an effect. I don’t use Contacts App, so I thought maybe since I had that turned off previously, that turning it on might help but so far it seems inconsistent.
Anyone know the definition of “unknown sender” in this context? Does Messages check incoming message phone/email ids against entries in the Contacts App? If so then none of my incoming Messages would generate a notification as I have not added anything to Contacts App. Maybe iPhone does this behind the scenes.
Oh well.
Yes, that’s exactly right. If you don’t have a contact card for someone in Contacts, Messages will consider them an Unknown Sender.
In general, not using Contacts (or some other app that uses the shared systemwide contact database) will limit various standard features. For instance, to get a Medical ID that emergency responders could access if they found you unresponsive, you have to have your own contact card set as My Card. And if you want the phone to alert important people in your life in the event of a fall or car crash, you’d need contact cards for those people. Or if you want to have Do Not Disturb on at night so no calls get through but still allow key members of your family to break through, you’d need contact cards for them.
Thanks Mr. Engst! I guess I get wrapped up in nomenclature sometimes, I suppose it would be hard to describe, in the small space available, ‘Sender Phone Number Which Is Not Already In Contacts App’! But ‘unknown’ is still not quite right. I could know the number and the caller but just choose not to use Contacts. I’ll monitor what happens now a bit more closely, now that I think I have turned on ‘notifications from Senders not in Contacts App is ok’, since in this case most Senders would be ‘unknown’.
I stopped using Contacts a long time ago when stories appeared about app developers and large Tech Cos scooping up the data. People I know/communicate with have not given me permission to share their contact information so I try to protect it by keeping off the digital devices.
The importance of the contact database to other functionalities is clear, but none of the case you cite is important in my use case.
I would relax about this. Currently, any app that needs/requests access to Contacts must ask macOS to request it from you.
The benefits of having a full contact list in Contacts can be found all over the place—it helps spam filtering in Mail, for example.
Dave
Thank you Dafuki,
I saw the value of iPhone and its software from the very beginning, I waited hours outside a shop to purchase the first version, and baffled work colleagues when showing it, they just didn’t grasp the concept.
For users who take advantage of iPhone’s capabilities, yes, integration of apps can be a benefit but Apple does build dependencies into the functionalities and makes certain assumptions about users and over time has made things so complex that average users just roll over and take whatever Apple decides to do. It’s a business strategy that has worked but it has its costs for users and society.
For users who simply want iPhone as for example… a mobile phone with SMS capability (a perfectly valid use imho), it would be nice if basic functionality like notifications from Messages and the phone ringing for an incoming call didn’t require so much fussing about and worked consistently without dependencies on Contacts, confusing and buried settings etc. It used to be like that!