I know in the scheme of things the personalized Memoji doesn’t rank highly among the issues discussed here, but for my sins I spent some time designing one which was a rather good likeness and was fun to use with friends and family. But no more. Following the recent update to iOS 15.5 on my iPhone 11 my personalized Memoji has disappeared. I don’t mean the Memoji or Memoji Stickers buttons in the Messages app, or the Memojis that come with the phone. They are all still there.
I am not alone with experiencing this issue. I’ve seen it discussed in the Apple support community, but the problem there is that so many people don’t read the question and just tell you how to make the buttons appear. I expect better from TidBITS readers!
I have, of course, closed and reopened the Messages app, and shut down and rebooted the phone. To no avail.
Does the collective intellect of this forum have any idea how to recover the errant Memojis? They must be stored somewhere, either on the phone or more likely in iCloud.
FWIW, my personalized Memoji is still available and functioning normally on my iPhone 12 mini after the recent update to iOS 15.5. I back up my iPhone to both my Mac and iCloud. I don’t have any helpful suggestions because I don’t have any idea where the Memoji are stored or backed up. Since your personalized Memoji is tied to your AppleID have you tried logging out of iCloud account on your phone, then logging back in? BTW, I just learned my personalized Memoji is available in Messages on my Mac. I had just never dug deep enough to find it.
Just now I checked in Messages on my iPad and the icon for Memoji Stickers was not there. I tapped ‘…’ thinking I could add the Memoji Messages app (Edit>More Apps) but it did not appear in the list of available apps. However, I did find ‘Recents’ which I added. I composed a Message and when I tap on the Recents icon I see the personalized Memoji I have sent to other people recently, so I could use one of those. This is a workaround, not a solution.
Thanks for the suggestion Nalarider. The problem with logging out of my Apple iCloud account is, if I understand correctly, I lose all the content of my Wallet. And since it currently contains seven credit and debit cards and four store cards, it would take me a lot longer to replace them all manually than it would to reconstruct my personalized Memoji. With no guarantee that would reinstate my Memoji.
When you mentioned Message on the Mac I had a look there and the personalized Memojis showed up—for about half a second. Then they all disappeared!
Genius! I found the Recents icon and added to the displayed set—and sure enough, all the versions of my personalized Memojis are there!
As you say, it’s a workaround not a solution, but it certainly does allow me to use the Memojis once more until, who knows, someone can explain the issue and how to resolve it.
By the way, all, if you use your Memoji on your Mac as your photo, the Memoji animates when you log in, checking as you type, shaking heads if the password fails, and cheering when it doesn’t. Quite amusing…