2015 MBP and iPhone 8 Both Fail to Notify of New Messages When Nearby Each Other - Intermittent

When I have my 2015 MBP awake and my iPhone is nearby, sometimes I receive a message and neither my Mac nor my iPhone notify me, which means I don’t know I received a new message.

If I go into the Messages app on Mac or wake the iPhone, I can see the message.

It’s almost as if both devices think another device is notifying me. I do have a 2011 MBP around but I am signed out of iMessage on the Messages app on that computer.

A month or two ago I signed out of Messages on the 2015 MBP and nuked the Messages database. Set it up fresh, had to sign in again, wait for messages to download from iCloud, etc. It seems to solve the problem (and fix out of order messages) for about a week. Then the problem behavior returned.

MBP running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. Using Messages in iCloud on both devices. Bluetooth is enabled on both devices.

I suspect this is a bug with Messages on Mac. Anybody else run into this issue and if so have you been able to resolve it?

Edit: it’s my experience that if Bluetooth is turned off on the iPhone, this issue doesn’t happen. In that case both Mac and iPhone both seem to always show notifications for new messages. However turning off Bluetooth on iPhone isn’t ideal, as you might imagine.

Well, I agree with you. Yet that seems to be the case sometimes.

I’m currently having this same issue on a 2018 Mac Mini running Catalina and IOS 12 on iPhone SE. My wife has the same issues on the MBP 2015 and iPhone XR. Is there a way to turn Messages off on the Mac so that my phone works like normal? Any other solution to this?

You can either turn off notifications for iMessage on the Mac (in preferences>notifications) or turn it off completely in the app preferences.

Thanks. I’ve turned off the notifications for now.

OP here. I think this issue eased up in Mojave on 2015 machine.

These days I’m on a 2019 16” MBP with Catalina (same iPhone 8) and haven’t seen the issue at all with this setup.