“I wrote to you,” my wife always says, but your messages via iMessage don’t seem to reach me, at least neither iPhone nor Apple Watch vibrate for me. I operate my devices muted by default, so I am only alerted by vibration signal. In the message app itself, however, my wife’s messages then strangely appear. What am I doing wrong? With an old iPhone that I recently exchanged for a new one, everything was okay.
The problem also affected a new iPhone in the Mac & i editorial office – and it drove the person concerned crazy.
Turning notifications off and on again, setting your own settings for the Apple Watch and iPhone, restarting devices – none of this helped: One contact didn’t want to trigger a vibration with new iMessage messages, all the others worked as usual. Here, too, the problem only occurred after a device change.
iOS 18 was affected on our device, but the error still seems to occur under iOS 26.
Individual settings for the beep
The solution to this puzzle finally turned out to be a configuration problem. This is because the contact, which was suddenly no longer signaled, had been provided with a manually configured vibration pattern years ago in order to recognize the person more quickly – the standard vibration “sound” was therefore changed.
Because just like a ringtone a specific vibration pattern can also be assigned to a contact, there is a whole selection for this.
However, when switching devices from the older to the new iPhone, this setting was not adopted – it is unclear why. By not adopting the manually configured vibration pattern, iOS then simply decided not to play any vibration at all – messages from the contact remained silent, there was no signaling except for the notification on the display, which you don’t look at all the time.
You can fix the vibration-free contact accordingly by simply going to the settings of the contact in the address book (on the iPhone) and assigning a new vibration pattern to it. This can be done via “Edit” and “Message Sound”. Scroll up there and click on “Haptics”. If “None” is selected here, you have found the problem: Then switch to “Synchronized (default)” at the top for the default vibration pattern or select a different one. It is also possible to create your own completely own pattern.
By the way, this change also fixes the missing signaling on the Apple Watch, as it also adheres to the setting.
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