iPad Disappearing notifications

[Morac]

I got a new iPad Pro 11, set it up under iOS 13.3 and found that notifications would either not show up or disappear after showing up sometime later. This happened for a variety of apps including Gmail, CNN, Facebook, etc. Apps that use local push notifications worked fine.

I tried resetting all settings which seem to help (for the brief time I tested), but I also noticed it changed the “Show Previews” notification setting to “Always” when it had been “when unlocked”.

I changed it back and noticed that notifications started going missing again. When I toggled it back to “always” some came back.

Is there some issue with notifications and that setting?

 

[Morac]

So it turns out changing “Show Previews” to “always” doesn’t help. It’s toggling that setting that causes notifications to come back, but that doesnt always work. Sometimes I have to toggle the ”show in Notification Center“ button for a specific app. For example, the notification for the Mail app disappeared until I toggled that setting.

This works fine on my iPhone, but is horribly broken on my iPad. Anyone else having this problem?

 

[chris4565]

Do they disappear because you e. g. already dealt with the notifications on your iPhone? E. g.: I usually power on my iPad some time in the evening. Then I get a bunch of notifications pop up, but when I swipe down the notification center it's all empty because iPadOS realized that I already dealt with the notifications on my iPhone.

 

[Morac]

Nope. I haven’t cleared them on my iPhone (or anywhere else) yet.

I can be using my iPad get a notification and then swipe down and suddenly a bunch of notifications disappear. Worse is when I’m not using my iPad and they just appear to never show up. I’ll check my iPhone and see a bunch of notifications for apps that are also on my iPad, but the ones that should be on the iPad aren’t there. I tend to disable app badges for notifications for most apps as I tend to just swipe delete them, which doesn’t clear the badge. That means when this happens I would never know if I didn’t check my iPad.

As mentioned, toggling the “show previews” option tends to bring most of them back, though sometimes I need to disable and re-enable the “show in Notification Center” option for individual apps (like Mail).

This isn’t consistent though. Sometimes it seems to be working fine. For example this morning the notifications were there. Other times they disappear shortly after they show up.

I don’t know if this is a side effect of restoring a backup from an existing iPad, but my understanding is that the push notification tokens aren’t in the backup, which is why notifications don’t work until apps are opened again. The same thing seems to happen when resetting all settings or deleting and reinstalling apps. I really don’t want to wipe my iPad and set it up as new to try and fix this, since not only would that be a pain to set up, but I don’t know if it will help.

 

[chris4565]

Then I also don't know a solution to be honest, sorry Perhaps someone else has an other idea.

 

[Morac]

I contacted Apple Support and they told me to restore through iTunes. That’s their go to answer when they don’t know what the problem is, but I decided to humor then since they said I could restore my backup when done. I’ve already wasted over 24 hours setting up my new iPad, so I guess a few hours more can’t hurt.

The restore completed and now I’m restoring my backup. I’m not sure what to do if this doesn’t work though. The person suggested I return the iPad, but that doesn’t seem the correct action for what is obviously a software bug.

On a side note, prior to doing the restore, iTunes refused to recognize that my iPad was set up to backup to iCloud. It kept defaulting to iTunes no matter how many times I changed it.

 

[chris4565]

I contacted Apple Support and they told me to restore through iTunes. That’s their go to answer when they don’t know what the problem is, but I decided to humor then since they said I could restore my backup when done.

That reminds me of the official Apple forums. Whenever I'm looking for the solution of a problem and find an appropriate thread there I see in 90% of the cases that a so-called "Community Specialist" just copy/pasted an answer which is in almost 0% of the cases directly related to the problem and instead is some general troubleshooting guide ?

Good luck with the restore ?

 

[Morac]

So it seemed like the restore fixed this, but after turning my iPad off and on a day later, I stopped getting notifications entirely for any app until I opened it.

Edit: I restarted again because settings was hanging trying to go to the Game Center settings and notifications appear to be still working so I have no idea why they stopped the first restart after a restore.

 

[chris4565]

Fingers crossed that it will stay this way ?

 

[Ipadfever]

I contacted Apple Support and they told me to restore through iTunes. That’s their go to answer when they don’t know what the problem is, but I decided to humor then since they said I could restore my backup when done. I’ve already wasted over 24 hours setting up my new iPad, so I guess a few hours more can’t hurt.

The restore completed and now I’m restoring my backup. I’m not sure what to do if this doesn’t work though. The person suggested I return the iPad, but that doesn’t seem the correct action for what is obviously a software bug.

On a side note, prior to doing the restore, iTunes refused to recognize that my iPad was set up to backup to iCloud. It kept defaulting to iTunes no matter how many times I changed it.

Apple tech support, their senior advisors and the engineer team are google experts that received any sort of knowledge from a Cracker Jack box!

 

[Morac]

Apple tech support, their senior advisors and the engineer team are google experts that received any sort of knowledge from a Cracker Jack box!

I agree, but since the engineers started ignoring direct bug reports from non-beta users, they are the only way to get bug details to engineering.

 

[Morac]

So after the restore and everything I had at least 2 notifications disappear today that I’m aware of. One for the Mail app which I got back by toggling the option to show in Notification Center off for my mail account, opening the Notification Center and the toggling it back on. The other for an app, which I got back by changing the “show previews” option to “always” and back to “when unlocked”.

 

[Ipadfever]

So after the restore and everything I had at least 2 notifications disappear today that I’m aware of. One for the Mail app which I got back by toggling the option to show in Notification Center off for my mail account, opening the Notification Center and the toggling it back on. The other for an app, which I got back by changing the “show previews” option to “always” and back to “when unlocked”.

What worries me is if they will ever fix these issues, they may never fix some of them!

 

[Morac]

I was hoping iOS 13.4 would fix this and for nearly 24 hours it looked like it did, but then my notifications disappeared again. I also saw this on my iPhone, when I restarted it a bunch of old ones from earlier in the day appeared.

Possibly related to this, I stopped receiving Podcast notifications about a month or two ago.

 

[Morac]

Just mentioning that this is still an issue in iOS 14.2. I’ve also seen it on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I’ve actually seen the notifications vanish while the Lock Screen is open.

 

[Morac]

I’m convinced this is a bug with Face ID compatible devices. I rarely if ever has this problem on my old iPad Air 2 and iPhone 7 Plus. My iPad Pro 11 and iPhone 12 Pro Max have this happen frequently. Today it happened on my iPhone twice within an hour. I can get the notifications back, but I have to know they are missing to do that.

I did some searching and people have been complaining about this since the iPhone X came out in 2018.

Notifications disappearing on lock screen

Hey all— I’m loving the new iPhone X (iOS 11.1), but I’ve got a peculiar notification problem that didn’t seem to happen on my 7. When I first wake the phone screen, I see all my recent notifications. Then, Face ID unlocks the phone and suddenly all my mail (and only mail) notifications...

forums.macrumors.com

None of the “solutions“ in any of the articles actually fix the problem though.