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I am not receiving SMS on my Android phone: main problems and how to fix them

Although today the standard is to talk with messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, SMS are still essential for certain communications, for example with your bank, the DGT, health appointments, among others. What’s more, if you are in a place with a poor internet connection, you will always have to resort to text messages to talk to someone. So if you experience SMS problems on your Android phone, here are nine potential solutions to fix it.

Make sure Airplane Mode is not active

Sometimes the solution is the simplest and easiest thing in the world, but there are those who choose activate Airplane Mode when you are at home relaxing or in your sleep hours and maybe later you forget to turn it off when you get up.

With Airplane Mode turned on, you will see an airplane in the top right corner of your phone as a reminder and more importantly, you will have your mobile data deactivated, reason why you do not receive the SMS.

You can reactivate it either by sliding from top to bottom on the main screen and tapping on the plane or by entering the “settings“>”connections” and there unchecking the airplane mode.

airplane mode

Check the status of mobile data

If Airplane Mode is not activated and you still do not receive messages, one reason may be that your mobile data is not available or the connection is bad. You can quickly and qualitatively know its status in the upper right corner in the form of vertical bars. If there is none marked or there is only one bar, it is likely that the problem is that.

In a more technical and precise way, you can go to “Settings” > “About phone” > “Status” > “Network” (the path may differ depending on the model, so you can always pull the search engine) and there read the signal strength with two numbers: a negative number in dBm and a positive number in to its. Roughly speaking, the more negative and positive the first and second respectively, the better.

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It may be an incident from your operatorin which case you will only have to wait for it to resolve, but if it is not the case, try moving to make sure you are not in a black spot of coverage, try deactivating and activating Airplane Mode for a few seconds or directly turning off and turning on the device.

Reset your network settings

If all of the above has not worked and you still suspect that it is a network issue, you can always reset these settings, which will fix unexpected and unknown failures.

Do not panic because it is far from restoring your Android to the factory: it only resets those settings, but it does not affect your data or the rest of the phone and the information stored. All it does is return network settings to their initial statethat is, mobile data, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which in practice will mean you re-enter passwords and synchronize devices.

To do this, go to “settings” > “General Administration” (can be System) > “Restore” and there select “Reset network settings“. You will have to confirm for it to become effective. If your Android does not have the same options, again choose the search engine and type “reset network settings” to speed up the process.

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Check your spam and blocked folders

One possibility why you are not receiving certain SMS that you expect is that they may have been filtered to a separate folder, for example spam. This can happen if your SMS management application has an automatic security filtering system.

Assuming that you use Google Messages (the default application for Android), you can view these folders by clicking on the icon with the three lines and accessing the specific “Spam and blocked” folder. If you use another app, it should have a folder with a similar function.

Another possibility by which do not receive SMS from a specific contact is that you have blocked him, in which case they won’t even make it to the aforementioned folder. In that case, to solve it and receive your text messages, you will first have to unblock the contact.

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free up space

If your phone is a modest terminal at the hardware level and it is already a few years old, perhaps you are already appreciating a certain slowness and you have run out of space. Especially if your space is full, it may happen that you no longer receive new messages. However, in this case, your phone will display a message informing you that you will not be able to

You can free up storage space on your Android by deleting media files, apps you don’t use, clearing the cache, deleting data from apps like WhatsApp, deleting downloads, among others.

Have you gone from iPhone to Android?

If you used an iPhone before you had an Android phone, this may be the reason why you are not receiving SMS. Google recommends deactivating “Messages” from the phone with the bitten apple because iMessage is not available on Android, which means that you could lose its reception on your new terminal.

To do this, take your iPhone and in “settings” > “Messages“, slide the toggle to disable it. If you don’t have the iPhone with you, then you’ll need to contact Apple to have your iMessage number disabled.

Disable Power Saving Mode

Power Save Mode is optimized for Optimize battery life above all else to get the most out of it. Thus, this function is visible to the naked eye due to the brightness of the screen, but it also makes use of the processes that are happening in the background.

Because of the Saving Mode, some functions do not work properly, for example the reception of messages of all kinds, since reduces the frequency of checking for new milestones, messages and notifications. If this is the reason, it can be solved as easily as deactivating the “Saving Mode” directly from the quick access or better, if you consider that it is important that the SMS are out of this optimization process, you can do it from “Settings” > “Applications ” > “Manage applications”. There select the Messages and mark No restrictions.

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Same procedure applied in WhatsApp

update the app

As a general rule, any incident with an application can be solved by updating it, since it is possible that the software has problems or vulnerabilities which are expected to be resolved soon.

Check if you have pending to update Messages from the Google Play Store app and install them if applicable.

Update your Android version

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If none of the above methods work, thenupdating the operating system can be the solution to your problems Since, as with applications, the OS can also harbor bugs or security flaws that affect its operation.

Check your Android version in “Settings” > “System” > “About phone” and update it in “Settings” > “System“, where you will have to touch on “Software update“. A good idea so that you do not have to do it manually is to activate automatic updates.

Home | Photo montage by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash and public domain vectors from PublicDomainVectors.

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