In a quest to extend the battery life of iPhones as much as possible, Apple aggressively handles apps running in the background. A side effect of this can be that notifications from selected apps can be delayed. It is actually quite common for iPhone owners to complain about getting delayed notifications from WhatsApp. This can be a deal-breaker for a lot of people and if you are facing the same issue, here’s what you can do to possibly solve the delayed WhatsApp notifications issue on your iPhone.
The issue here is that users do not get a notification from WhatsApp whenever they receive a message. It is only when they open the app manually that the notifications for all new messages come at once. This is a major issue as an affected iPhone user can end up missing out on important messages. Plus, opening WhatsApp periodically to check if there’s any new message or not is not really an ideal solution.
The delayed WhatsApp notification issue primarily used to happen in the early days of iOS, with Apple giving priority to notifications from messaging apps now. If you have suddenly started facing this issue, there can be a lot of reasons behind it. Thankfully, you can solve the delayed WhatsApp notification issue by trying the solutions listed below. At least one of them will work and you should be getting WhatsApp notification on your iPhone like normal. Remember there is no sure shot fix to this problem so your best bet is to try the possible fix mentioned below in the hope that it will work.
1. Force Kill WhatsApp
A possibly simple and straightforward fix for delayed incoming notifications from WhatsApp is to simply force close the app and open it again. To close WhatsApp, you need to bring up the App Switcher and then swipe up on the WhatsApp card to force kill it. Then, proceed to open WhatsApp again to see if it fixes the issue with the delayed notifications or not.
2. Switch Between Mobile Data and Wi-Fi
In some cases, it is possible that incoming messages from WhatsApp are being delayed due to an issue with your internet connection itself. So, if you are on mobile data, you should connect to a Wi-Fi network to see if that fixes the issue or not. You can also try vice versa if you are getting delayed WhatsApp notifications while on a Wi-Fi network.
3. Restart your iPhone
If closing and re-opening WhatsApp did not fix the issue, you can try to restart your iPhone. It is always a good idea to restart your iPhone if you have not done so in a while as this helps in clearing the memory. A restart should fix the delayed notification issue with WhatsApp for most iPhone users.
4. Ensure Background Refresh is Enabled
To ensure that applications are able to refresh in the background and send notifications, Apple allows them to refresh automatically in the background. Since many apps can end up abusing this feature or cause excessive battery drain, the company allows users to manually toggle this feature off for installed apps on their device.
So, on your iPhone, you should check whether background refresh for WhatsApp is enabled or not. For this, you need to head over to Settings → General → Background App Refresh and ensure the toggle for WhatsApp is enabled.
5. Check WhatsApp Notification Settings
It is entirely possible that you accidentally ended up changing WhatsApp notification settings. So, head into WhatsApp settings to ensure that all your notification settings are set properly. You can also change the notification sound to see if that helps or not. For this, open WhatsApp, go to the Settings tab followed by Notifications, and ensure the Show Notifications option is enabled for message and group notifications. There’s also an option to reset WhatsApp notification which you can try to see if that fixes the issue or not.
6. Reinstall WhatsApp
If the above two methods did not work, its time for some other serious measures. You should uninstall WhatsApp and then reinstall it on your iPhone to see if that fixes the issue with the delayed notifications. Since uninstalling WhatsApp will also delete your chat data, make sure to create a backup of it. Depending on your chat history size, the backup process can take a while.
7. Reset iPhone Settings
In most cases, reinstalling WhatsApp should fix the notification issue. If that does not happen, your penultimate option is to reset the settings of your iPhone. This will restore your device to factory settings but will not touch your data in any way. Your iPhone might restart during the process. If it does not, make sure to restart it after doing a reset. This should hopefully fix the delayed notification issue with WhatsApp messages on your iPhone.
8. Reset iPhone
If none of the above options worked in fixing the delayed WhatsApp incoming message notification, your last-ditch effort is to completely reset your iPhone. Your entire device will be formatted as a part of the process so you should ideally create a backup of your data before proceeding ahead. Make sure to backup your WhatsApp chat history to iCloud as well during this process.
You can follow our guide on how to reset your iPhone 11/Pro or iPhone X or iPhone 7 and below. After that, it is best that you start afresh and install WhatsApp directly from the App Store and check if the notifications are being delayed or not.
The above steps should work in solving the delayed WhatsApp incoming issue that you are facing on your iPhone. Do drop a comment and let us know the solution that worked for you so that it could help our readers as well!
