[BUG] iOS app only recieves notifications and then the message is gone

[JakOduha]

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Is there an existing issue for this?

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Current Behavior

At least three different users (all of whom are using the iphone) frequently recieve only a notification about a message and when they tap the notification, the message is gone. This seems to be happening mainly with messages including images or links.

Expected Behavior

Users can read messages after they tapped the notification.

Steps To Reproduce

No response

iOS Version

26.5 and 15.8.7

Session Version

2.15.2

Anything else?

Sorry for not being able to provide more info. I hope I didn't write a bug report for nothing, but I wasn't able to find any mention of a similar problem (most people seem to be having the opposite problem, when the apps works fine, but the notifications don't).

[mpretty-cyro]

Hey @JakOduha thanks for reporting this issue, sorry for taking so long to respond - are you still experiencing the issue?

If so is there any chance you can share your device logs (Settings -> Help -> Export Logs)? Can you also confirm whether you receive a generic "You've received a message" notification or if it contains actual message content?

[JakOduha]

Hi @mpretty-cyro , thanks for the response. I'm being told that the problem persists. Users can see the notification WITH the message content, but once they open the app itself, the messages aren't there. At first, we thought this only affected messages with links or images, but just now users reported that even plain text messages were absent.
Here are the requested logs:

com.loki-project.loki-messenger_2026-07-28--05-35-32-658.log
com.loki-project.loki-messenger_2026-07-28--06-19-31-863.log

[mpretty-cyro]

Hey @JakOduha , thanks for these logs are really helpful, essentially what seems to be happening is that the notification handler has the correct decryption keys for the group, but for some reason the main app doesn't.

You wouldn't happen to know whether these users had been kicked and re-added to the group would you?

I found a case where the above situation can cause the issue and am taking a look to see if I can find another behaviour but figured I'd ask just in case

[mpretty-cyro]

I've merged in #719 which may help the issue there may be some cases where it could still occur

This one will probably be included in the release after the next one that comes out (we are currently waiting on Apple to approve a pending 2.15.4 release which is taking abnormally long, this would be included in a 2.15.5/2.16.0)

[JakOduha]

Hey @JakOduha , thanks for these logs are really helpful, essentially what seems to be happening is that the notification handler has the correct decryption keys for the group, but for some reason the main app doesn't.

You wouldn't happen to know whether these users had been kicked and re-added to the group would you?

I found a case where the above situation can cause the issue and am taking a look to see if I can find another behaviour but figured I'd ask just in case

Hey @mpretty-cyro ,
As for your question: I am an admin of all the groups these users are members of and I am certain none of them have ever been kicked out.
Thanks for giving this issue the attention.

[PeterBuchHansen]

I'm also experiencing this issue. I'm currently using version 2.15.4.

Q: Is my understanding correct that the fix is expected to be included in the upcoming 2.15.5 or 2.16.0 release?
Q: If so, have either of those versions already been submitted to Apple for App Store review?

What I've experienced is that when notifications are enabled, if I interact with a notification, either by tapping it to open the app or by expanding it to see the preview, the message sometimes doesn't appear in the app afterward.
If I understand the bug and the related fix correctly, could this be a race condition where the message is being retrieved or decoded for the notification while the user is interacting with it, resulting in the message not being stored or displayed correctly in the app. (This is, of course, only speculation)

Regardless, it does not seam that #711 resolved the issue completely.

For now, I've disabled notifications, which seems to have somewhat stabilized the issue for me.

I'm also new to Session and have a related question.
Q: If I delete the app and reinstall it using my recovery phrase, will Session resync my message history, including images and attachments? Or would deleting the app permanently remove any locally stored messages that haven't been recovered correctly?

[mpretty-cyro]

Q: Is my understanding correct that the fix is expected to be included in the upcoming 2.15.5 or 2.16.0 release?

The changes have been merged into dev so will be included in the next release which at this stage will have the version 2.16.0

Q: If so, have either of those versions already been submitted to Apple for App Store review?

Not yet, the upcoming release includes a major feature which has been undergoing extensive cross-platform testing and fixing, there are no major areas I'm aware of that haven't been tested anymore so we should be preparing for a release soon

What I've experienced is that when notifications are enabled, if I interact with a notification, either by tapping it to open the app or by expanding it to see the preview, the message sometimes doesn't appear in the app afterward.
If I understand the bug and the related fix correctly, could this be a race condition where the message is being retrieved or decoded for the notification while the user is interacting with it, resulting in the message not being stored or displayed correctly in the app. (This is, of course, only speculation)

Regardless, it does not seam that #711 resolved the issue completely.

There have been a number of fixes for a few bugs which could impact push notifications in different ways was that all had similar symptoms, the main two PRs with fixes were #711 and #719

The issue you were experiencing is likely due to a painful hack that we need to do to try to avoid a crash resulting from Apple being overly strict with the app still having an open database connection when it transitions into a "suspended" state (we don't get a hook telling us when this transition occurs so have no way to directly prevent the crash without properly managing database shutdown in a bunch of different locations - we did a lot of work trying to resolve this over the years but couldn't fully remove the crash so landed at the hack we use).

Essentially when you get a push notification the message data is encrypted and saved to a file on disk, when the app next launches (eg. when you tap the notification) we read any of those files and try to load them into the database which is where messages shown in a conversation are found.

There were a few cases where that file could be incorrectly removed (or only partially removed) before it was loaded into the database, which results in the behaviours described here (seeing a notification, but having no message when opening the app).

For now, I've disabled notifications, which seems to have somewhat stabilized the issue for me.

The makes me think it was related to one of the fixes above because they would essentially prevent the app from downloading the message via it's standard polling if it was received (but not processed) as a push notification.

Q: If I delete the app and reinstall it using my recovery phrase, will Session resync my message history, including images and attachments? Or would deleting the app permanently remove any locally stored messages that haven't been recovered correctly?

The network only stores the past 14 days of messages/attachments so if you delete the app and reinstall it with your recovery phrase (or link it on another device), you can only retrieve messages/attachments sent in the past 14 days. It will include images and attachments for that period though.

If you were to delete and reinstall it would re-download any messages that were impacted by this issue from the past 14 days, but you would lost any that are older than that.