Visual Voicemail v Siri

I wanted to document this so that hopefully some poor soul will be able to discover it and know what’s going on.

When I recently upgraded my iPhone from an 11 Pro to a 14 Pro, everything went super smooth, except I noticed that I was no longer getting voicemail. I opened a case with T-Mobile, my carrier, which was escalated repeatedly, each time saying that everything on their end was good. Eventually, they said I needed to work with Apple, but Apple eventually said that it was T-Mobile.

So far, I had tried:

• Resetting the phone.
• Resetting network settings.
• Cycling power multiple times.
• Changing the greeting.
• Changing the PIN.
• Turning off cellular data and back on.

None of these did anything to resolve the issue. I was stuck in 1995 having to dial my own number and use various digits to delete messages. It was traumatic.

Fast forward multiple weeks with it broken, and I finally stumble across an article with a bunch of ideas in it. A lot of them revolved around Siri problems.

Now, I see what you’re asking yourself: why in the world would Siri interfere with basic voicemail services. But guess what? Literally 1 second after disabling Siri completely, 37 voicemails showed up, which was the exact number in my T-Mobile account.

I shared this with the T-Mobile agent, and they were shocked. And yet here we are. There’s no sane reason for Siri to have interfered with even knowing that there’s a new voicemail. But then, that’s modern software: a series of non-deterministic behaviors.