Texting issues when connected to WiFi

Happy to report that this is STILL a problem. 

I’ve had a Pixel 6, which has very poor phone connectivity at my house, so I was stuck with these problems.

I also had problems making phone calls. Would dial, nothing would happen. Sometimes the other person would receive a call and my phone would be convinced it hadn’t even started dialing.

I changed SIMs, updated all kinds of settings, factory reset phone... Nothing.

Plus it’s intermittent, so couldn’t reliably troubleshoot since SOME messages got through.

I just upgraded to a new phone (Pixel 9) which must have a better modem, because I’m getting decent coverage over cellular at my house.

On account of this, I just turned off wifi calling entirely.

This appears to have resolved the problem. Calls and SMS are going through instantly without trouble.

Just going to have to remember to turn wifi calling back on if I ever need it. And suffer through the reliability while I do.

I’m curious what other ISPs and routers people might be using. I’m on Xfinity Xfi and I know they lock down a lot of things on their network and routers. Wondering if that might contribute, because it seemed like I had okay reliability on some other networks. (Although I work at home, so I don’t try a lot of other ones.)

This happens to my wife (I just bought he a brand new Samsung 23 through t-mobile).  It also happened to me today (Asus Rog7).  I have corporate level WiFi at home and in my office and have never previously has this issue (Cisco-Meraki).  My wife is required to have her cell phone (Car Dealership), and she is getting extremely frustrated.  The problem does appear to be switching between cell and WiFi signals which causes a delay on connectivity and the message times out.  The error is frustrating because it does not specify which message(s) failed to send...

developer options still working in December 2023. called something else now, though. check your phone info.

CS and tech support still don’t know how to troubleshoot properly. try this before calling.

please hand someone else your phone or computer..no one has a clue who Mathew is in here.

Matthew this is kaleya call me 

It seems in 5 years tmobile has refused to solve this issue. Not surprising really. I started with Sprint, which was decent. It had its moments, however they always at least tried to make things right. Discounts for healthcare workers, discounts for length of service with them,  etc.

But tmobile just simply doesn't care. Exorbitant prices for absolutely horrible cell service and even worse customer service.

Mine’s greyed out. They’re literally preventing me from using Messenger on mobile data when connected to wifi. That’s it, I’m outta here. F TMO

I can’t believe this is still an issue four years on. No wonder people are leaving this service in droves. I’m about to be one of them, since you obviously don’t care about your customers. And no, I will not go into further details - you have plenty after four effing years.

I suspect that every 24 hours you’re allowed a certain number of SMS over WIFI. I suspect that after that’s exceeded, you’ll have to wait until the next day and you’ll see that magically you can text again.

Let’s just say I have a strong suspicion that the carrier makes money with each text over cellular and makes nothing over WIFI. 

Hypothetically were this true, the APN settings point to servers where these limits would be enforced.

Joined T-Mobile for the first time last month, and have been having the same issue the entire time (on a Samsung Galaxy S22 with up-to-date software). SMS messages and pics do not come through when I’m connected to any WIFI network. I’ve chatted with TM tech support, called TM tech support, called Samsung tech support, chatted with Samsung tech support, who remotely logged in to my phone to have a look around and change some settings, etc.  I’ve changed so many settings, I don’t even remember where I started. Nothing has worked. Was thinking of dropping TM altogether.

Today I found a setting CONNECTIONS > DATA USAGE > MOBILE DATA ONLY APPS that I hadn’t previously seen (or been directed to by any tech support). This is described as “Sets apps to always use mobile data, even when your phone is connected to Wi-Fi”. I selected it, scrolled down to and selected Messenger. All SMS messages - text and pics - have been coming thorough in real time, even as my phone’s wi-fi is turned on. It’s only been a few hours, but that’s longer than any other “fix” I’ve tried.

And yes, this seems like an obvious solution; like I should have known to do this. But in all my years of owning a smart phone I’ve never had to change such a setting. And if it’s so obviously easy, why wouldn’t TM or Samsung have suggested it?

I’ve been having the same problem for about 3 weeks. (As well as poor call quality. My call quality has been good for years)

Tech support said it may be my old SIM card. They sent me a new one but texting on Wifi is still not working. My wife’s phone can text over wifi.

I'm having the issue as well. Tech said account was set up correctly. 

I also developed the same issue recently. I recently purchased an unlocked Pixel 6 and transferred my SIM card between devices. I live in an area with no cell coverage and every time someone attempts to send me an MMS message, I cannot download the message until I either restart my phone (only works sometimes) or drive to an area with cell coverage.

Also have this issue. Need to get off wifi and get into cell coverage for texts to work. Tried creating a new APN with prescribed settings, tried most of the content from this thread. No success as of yet. Pixel 4.

My wife and I are experiencing the same problem. We can receive SMS messages, but when we try to send SMS messages it fails.

We live in an area with spotty cell coverage, so we rely on WIFI calling (which works fine for voice).

My wifi at home is a Deco M9 Mesh network running 2.4 and 5 GHz. My phone is a Galaxy S21+ and my wife has the S21.

I would say that this issue has not been resolved!

Problem still not solved. I was a happy Sprint customer of over 15 years, got the T-mobile sim card and been unhappy ever since. This needs to get fixed !  People if your thinking about T-mobile DONT DO IT. I will be looking to change providers shortly.  I have 3 phones in my family 2 x s20g5’s and I-phone 12 plus. All 3 have issues and do not like the t-mo network.  :(  cold hard truth, and customer service force me to give this company a “0”  on the 10 scale !   

My partner and I ported our phones from Verizon in November. We both purchased new devices when we ported over- iPhone for me, android for him. We never had any issues with our old service and our old phones. Since porting, neither one of us has consistently received text messages. We’ve called and had trouble tickets opened and no one has called us back. The only troubleshooting attempted was to just never have WiFi on on our phones (seriously?). T-Mobile, we’ve been your customers for 6 weeks- your service problems have apparently been going on for years and your support is nonexistent!

We're have the same issue

If anyone has enabled power/battery saver, the app/setting often saves battery by disconnecting from wifi while it’s not in use. This can cause a problem if you send a text message before it can reconnect. I always set the battery saver and then choose to NOT disconnect from wifi (i.e. Custom setting), thereby, solving the problem I once had. 

So I’m having the same issue but it definitely only started once my phone, (not iCloud), storage became nearly full.  Memory is just about used up and now my texts won’t send on WiFi as well as browsers are slow and not loading/ all apps crashing… Ive has to delete and offload all apps…I def need an upgrade With more storage than 64.

I have been having issues for a while. I just assumed it was my phone. (not a normal one) interesting to see its not just me. Phone calls and texts both only seem to really come in when I am not on wifi. In order to sign in, I had to take wifi off to get my two-factor authentication to get the text. I can call out no problem, texting out sometimes does not seem to be an issue. It's also not EVERY text. it's strange.

I was able to solve a similar issue. While connected to WiFi, and good 4G LTE  signal, and receiving the error message "cellular network not available. Connect to WiFi for messaging?" while attempting to send texted and all other internet functionality seemed to be working. And yes. There was a question mark at the end, even though that's not a question. Pet peeve of mine.

Ih

I'vead the same phone for years, and I've been a T-Mobile customer for almost a decade. Never had this problem, and not sure why someone would leave a great network for such a minor issue. That's like leaving Ford because your car didn't start one day. Anyway, I had called T-Mobile support for an unrelated and during that process they had me reset my network settings. That's when it started happening. I came across this thread and hopefully this helps some folks...

Check Settings>More under Wireless Networks and see if WiFi Calling is disabled. If so, turn it on and change Connection preferences to "Cellular Network Preferred". Texts began to send normally, and I was even able to keep texting after changing Connection preferences back to "WiFi Preferred" and even disabling WiFi Calling entirely.

I tried just about all of the suggestions with not luck. Weird combinations of issues. Could send text over wifi to some iphones not others; could never send text or pictures over wifi to ANY android phone; etc. Finally just reset my network settings and so far so good. I wonder of network setting accumulate changes over months or years and gets confused. Anyway... will let you know if it sticks.

To clarify, I've always had WiFi calling enabled.  The change today was to select which network it attempts to use first, WiFi vs. mobile.

I've been having a lot of trouble with this at work.  In my office I don't get a good cellular reception but my phone is connected to WiFi.  However, I consistently have the problem where SMS won't send (thru Messages).  Sometimes they are just really slow and they eventually go thru, though on occasion they get dropped completely (especially pictures).  Sometimes turning WiFi on and off helps push them thru, sometimes it doesn't.  However, I might have finally found the fix.  I switched the WiFi calling preference from mobile network to WiFi.  After doing this, when I send an SMS it consistently sends within 1-2 seconds.  Prior to the change, they would be in the "sending" state for 5-10 seconds minimum or 30+ minutes in the worst case when they just weren't getting thru.   And for reference I have a Pixel 3.