Starting sometime yesterday morning, all notifications from non-Apple apps on my iPhone, including badges, stopped working.
This includes Facebook Messenger, LINE, Words with Friends, BlueSky, etc. I didn’t notice that someone had sent me LINE messages around noon until I happen to go into the app at 9 pm and I saw new messages from various people there.
Apple apps like Messages and iCloud email with push notification seem to continue to notify. Apple app notifications also arrive on my Watch.
I tried a forced restart. And I double-checked the notifications settings and nothing appears to have changed.
I chatted with Apple support and the person on the other end didn’t seem to understand me very well and suggested a forced restart even after I told him twice that I already did that. He’s scheduled an Apple support call for me at 9 am, but in the meantime - anybody have any ideas?
I’m using iOS 18.1.1 on my iPhone 13 Plus.
I think something similar might be happening with my iPad Pro, but I don’t usually use it much so I’m not sure.
I don’t. I have never used the focus feature in the control panel. But just in case I turned it on and off to see if toggling it would help (and because looking at the control panel it wasn’t obvious if it was on or off). Anyway, that didn’t help.
I really really don’t want to reset the whole iPhone and restore from iCloud, which is what I’m afraid Apple support is going to suggest.
I also tried signing out of iCloud to sign in again (which is something ChatGPT suggested) but at the last step it told me all the things that would disappear that I would have to set up again and I stopped.
I’m so upset with Apple I feel like taking all my Apple devices into the street and pouring gasoline over them and setting them ablaze. I do realize that will only hurt me though.
Apple Support was beyond useless.
After checking various settings and doing tests for over 90 minutes the guy said I should try “reset all settings.” I said every time I do that it takes forever to get things back to where they were. He insisted it would only take 2-3 minutes. So I gave in and did it and now I’m in reconstruction hell.
At first I couldn’t even connect to my wi-fi because my iPad couldn’t share the password with my iPhone for some reason. I tried to copy/paste it from my Mac and that didn’t work. I asked him why that didn’t work and he said copy/paste between Mac and iPhone is not a supported feature! What kind of idiot (seriously) did I get stuck with?
Finally for some reason wi-fi connected but I have to reconstruct endless things. Like my credit cards in my wallet. And I can’t connect to my local bank with their app now.
Anyway, that did not fit the notifications problem. He had the nerve to then say it must be an app problem and I need to contact the app developer. Simultaneously notifications, including badges, from all 3rd party apps stop coming in (even though the messages themselves are there if I open the apps to check) and it’s not Apple’s fault? Seriously? What? A conspiracy between the developers of LINE, WhatsApp, Words with Friends, FaceBook Messenger, BlueSky and more?
I gave up then and said goodbye. But I have no idea what to do.
First, the support person was surprisingly incompetent.
Second, what you’re describing is very odd. What’s particularly odd is notifications failing on both your iPhone and iPad. The notification system is local: one device does not broadcast notifications to others on the network. Data comes in to each device independently and each device posts the notifications from the applications that receive new messages. So . . . a mystery.
Third, Are the notifications appearing on your Mac?
I believe I was mistaken about the 2nd item. Notifications are (I think) appearing on the iPad. I just didn’t have them turned on for most apps there.
… pause to test …
Seems 50-50 there. Facebook Messenger notifications are coming in there. But TextNow notifications are not, even though the text I’m sending to the app is arriving if I open the app and check. Same with calls/voice recordings - I only see them if I open the app. No notifications or badges to indicate something new.
Based on one conjecture I read somewhere I deleted the Messenger app on the iPhone and reinstalled at, at which point iOS wanted to confirm notifications again. I said yes, and now Messenger notifications do come in on both the iPhone and iPad. I guess I’ll try that with other apps and see.
Notifications are appearing on my Mac but I don’t have all the same apps and notification settings on my Mac. For example, I don’t have separate apps for Messenger, BlueSky, Words with Friends, WhatsApp and others on my Mac. So I don’t have a complete comparison.
It looks like I found a solution among various suggestions while searching!
Logging out of those apps and logging back in doesn’t fix it. But it seems that deleting the app and reinstalling it does. When you open the app again one of the things you are prompted with is “allow this app to send notifications.”
If you accept that it seems to fix whatever system setting got lost. With most apps you get your data back. With some, you get partial data back, but it works.
I’ve tested this fix successfully so far with FaceBook Messenger, BlueSky, Words with Friends, and my VoIP app, TextNow. TextNow lost some old chat messages, but I can probably find them via the web if I really need them.
I have pending tests with WhatsApp and LINE - waiting for friends to reply.
Fortunately the number of 3rd party apps I expect notifications from is not a large number.
I wish I had tried this before “resetting all settings” which is mostly, but not completely back to where it was before.
Ah! Just got a notification from LINE as well. So this does seem to be the fix.
Something is clearly buggy in iOS that would cause this to happen, but I guess Apple will never admit it.
Before you reset everything, did you try toggling any apps in Settings > Notifications to off and back on? I would have tried that on the principle of forcing iOS to revisit a setting that had gotten wedged.
Yes, I did try the retoggling you mentioned hoping that would do it. But it didn’t help. It seems to have been a stuck setting not affected just by that. The apps getting reinstalled fixed it for each app but I wish there was a settings way of doing it.
But by deleting an App you may loose all its data (i.e. deleting WhatsApp will remove all your conversations and you may not be able to restore them if you didn’t have WhatsApp backups activated and up to date).
Wouldn’t be better to ‘offload’ the app instead (Settings > General > iPhone Storage > App Name > Offload App)?
Can you still try on an App that still has the problem? But not sure that would have been drastic enough to solve it.
The problem is that if you offload the app, you don’t delete any of its preferences/settings and that is probably where the problem exists.
If this was a Mac, I’d suggest selectively deleting the apps’ Preferences files, leaving the rest of their data alone. But I don’t think iOS gives you the kind of access you need to do this.
Notifications (used to anyway - haven’t done an implementation for a few years now, and I know the server-side APIs to send them did get simplified) involve a unique ID generated for a combination of the app and device.
That ID would be passed to the app’s servers/back-end infrastructure and stored, then used to send notifications to that device.
When wanting to test approval of notifications, to check that the code to check was written correctly, it was necessary to delete the app and wait for a period of time (very frustrating to test this. I think there was a workaround that involved messing around with the clock)
It sounds like something invalidated all your notification IDs, I can’t conceive of a reason for that, but also that the apps you use didn’t detect that and submit the new notification ID. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of them got that wrong: as I said, it was difficult to test.
