Iphone 4s message alert tone not working HELP!

Emiloly · Jan 27, 2012

Have had my 4s since just before xmas. I finally figured out how to load custom tones a few weeks ago, and everything was going well until yesterday and now for no apparent reason to this iPhone noob the sound no longer works on all my message alerts.
Ring tone is still working though.

I read online this seems to be a known os bug but I have tried resetting restoring etc and it's still not playing ball.

Any other ideas short if threatening the phone with a bowl of water?

Emiloly · Jan 27, 2012

Anyone?

Thomasjtsi · Jan 27, 2012

You say you've tried resetting.... have you performed a Hard Reset? Holding the Home & Lock buttons together for 10 seconds then release both.

Emiloly · Jan 27, 2012

thomasjtsi said:
You say you've tried resetting.... have you performed a Hard Reset? Holding the Home & Lock buttons together for 10 seconds then release both.

I tried restoring it but hard reset? Is there a difference?

Thomasjtsi · Jan 27, 2012

Yes they're different but, if you've restored your phone via iTunes and it didn't fix the issue then a Hard Reset won't help either.

Gdiddy636 · Jan 27, 2012

I went through this problem for a while as well. It started one day after I synced my phone to iTunes. It also seems to affect using headphones. I can plug the headphones in and they will not work, but take them out and plug them back in and boom they work. Yesterday, for the first time since I bought my phone, it suddenly shut itself off with 20% battery life. When I powered the phone back up the text & message tones were working again. The headphones are still iffy. I love my phone and I'd consider it to be perfect if it worked as its supposed to but I find these problems to be super annoying.

Gdiddy636 · Jan 27, 2012

False alarm...it only works sporadically

Emiloly · Jan 27, 2012

Yup my problem is intermittent. Randomly started working at 3am by playing my radio App that I hadn't turned off.

I called apple care and they are just going to replace the phone, seems to me that this is a common enough problem for them not to question it.

*sigh* I was hoping it would be something easy

Thomasjtsi · Jan 28, 2012

Emiloly said:
Yup my problem is intermittent. Randomly started working at 3am by playing my radio App that I hadn't turned off. I called apple care and they are just going to replace the phone, seems to me that this is a common enough problem for them not to question it.*sigh* I was hoping it would be something easy

Well it's awesome that they're going to replace your phone. I don't see any other company like Samsung or HTC doing this!!!

Emiloly · Jan 28, 2012

thomasjtsi said:
Well it's awesome that they're going to replace your phone. I don't see any other company like Samsung or HTC doing this!!!

This is true, although I Dell we're good about replacing my faulty laptop. I seem to attract broken stuff lol happens all the time.

tucson iphone tech · Mar 14, 2013

This post is about a year old but for those still searching for a solution to iphone alerts not working, here is one possible hardware fix:

Try replacing the dock connector. The reason being is that the loudspeaker uses wiring on the dock connector to transmit sound. If this is defective you can have weird problems with alerts. I just had a customer bring in an iPhone 4S today where the phone would ring okay, voice messages would play back fine, but no music would play back on the loudspeaker, and alterts--like text tones, email send or receive tones, or calendar alerts--wouldn't work. The phone would simply vibrate alerts. Replacing the docking port fixed this.