No audible / haptic for incoming SMS when connected via BT

[pgoelz]

I'M trying to figure out why my wife's iPhone 13 Pro Max sometimes does not produce audible / haptic SMS notifications when she is wearing a BT earpiece. The notification does show up in the notification center but she often gets no audible or haptic for incoming SMS even though she is wearing a BT earpiece that is connected and otherwise functioning.

All notification settings are correct. As soon as she turns the earpiece off (ie., disconnects) she once again gets audible (phone speaker) / haptic notifications.

She actually has two essentially identical earpieces (both Plantronics, nearly identical model numbers) and the behavior is different between them. One produces the behavior described above. The other does not intercept notifications at all..... notifications are routed to the phone speaker even though media audio is routed to the earpiece as expected.

My iPhone 13 Pro operates normally with my Plantronics earpiece..... notifications are always routed to the earpiece whenever it is connected.

Anyone else seeing this behavior? I'm stumped.... feels like a bug to me.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Different BT devices can give different results for sure.

What happens with the squirrely device if, in iOS settings, you "Forget this Device" and then re-pair it?

 

[ManuCH]

Could it be a software issue on the headset itself? As far as I know, if the paired bluetooth device supports A2DP streaming, notification sounds also go out via the bluetooth device, which should then play them back. However, notification sounds are often too short, and the earpiece doesn't wake up in time to actually make it audible.

Can you check if there are software updates available for the Plantronics earpiece? Or maybe can you try to change the bluetooth device type in the iPhone settings to see if the behavior changes?

You could also contact Plantronics support, I hear they are quite responsive. Also your problem doesn't seem to be that uncommon, by googling around a bit.

 

[pgoelz]

Well, it happened again.... a SMS arrived and she did not receive an audible notification. This time she was wearing her noise cancelling headset so that makes three BT devices that exhibit the same behavior.

The key seems to be that during the day she is listening to Audible books when SMS messages arrive. Perhaps the Audible app takes over notifications and disallows other notifications? She seems to get audible notifications OK if she is NOT using another app at the time.

The Audible app has a setting for "allow notifications". We thought that might be the issue but the behavior is the same regardless of the setting.

I'm still stumped and this is a VERY annoying bug.

 

[BrianBaughn]

You might end up restoring iOS as "new" on the phone and then NOT restoring from a backup. I've had notification sound issues that could only be fixed that way since you can't dig in there and get to the corruption that may be causing it.

 

[SCP]

I'M trying to figure out why my wife's iPhone 13 Pro Max sometimes does not produce audible / haptic SMS notifications...

Two quick questions - first, which models from Plantronics*? Second, does she have an Apple Watch? I use Voyager 3200 series with my iPP 13 15.4.1 and the earpiece isn't the culprit, at least for me. AW on the other hand, is a well known culprit when the phone is locked/screen off.


*Don't lose those earpieces... As if Poly didn't make it bad enough dropping a ton of the earpieces from the product line, HP is now acquiring Poly, so no telling what will happen...