Her phone is having two issues:

  1. Texts from other phones are received several hours after they were sent when she’s away from home, texts that she sends always go through instantly. If she’s at home, she always gets texts instantly.

  2. Her phone keeps coming up as “offline” on some other phones.

As I stated in the title, I’m not familiar with phones, so I have no idea where to even start with this. I have done nothing more than a google search that didn’t give me any results relevant to the issues.

  • boothin@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    I would check the power saver and data saver features and turn them off, those can stop background apps from using data and create those issues

  • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
    3·
    2 years ago

    From that description it could unfortunately be any number of things. It could be a hardware fault. It could be the SIM card. It could be the phone is turning off the radios for power saving mode. It could be that their phone is losing connection with the cell tower. It could be that the phone is configured to use WiFI calling and is dropping the cell tower connection when connected to WiFi.

    So, I would suggest these options in order of most to least convenient:

    1. Check if any power saving mode is turned on and try disabling them to see if that fixes anything.
    2. Check that the phone is connecting to the right cellular network.
    3. Try disabling WiFI calling if it is enabled.
    4. Replace the SIM card with another one from your network provider.
    5. Do a factory reset on the phone to the manufacturer settings. This should fix any issues with software like WiFI calling or selecting the wrong cellular network.
    6. Replace the phone under warranty.
    • vortexalOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      I tried what I could:

      Power saving mode is turned off.

      I have no idea how to check if it’s connecting to the right network.

      As far as I can tell, her phone only supports calling and texting through data. There isn’t an option for WiFi calling/texting.

      I guess that could work but It’s already using a custom SIM card from Tracphone because the phone is unlocked from it’s original provider.

      As far as doing a factory reset and replacing it, the issue isn’t bad enough right now that we would have to do that.

    • vortexalOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      I can try those but I edited the post to add information she didn’t initially give me and to fix a misconception on my part, if it changes your response.

  • TheSlyFox@lemmy.zip
    2·
    1 year ago

    Does she have data With wifi off?, Sometimes this could be something to do with the APN configuration not in the phone, what service does she have? T-Mobile? At&t?

    • vortexalOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m not actually sure if her phone has WiFi calling/texting. Her phone doesn’t say anything about using WiFi for calling/texting and texts/calls still go through even if both WiFi and data are off.

      Her phone service is through Tracphone.

  • Hubi@feddit.de
    2·
    2 years ago

    Maybe a dumb question, but have you tried restarting it? I had a phone a few years ago that would suddenly get terrible reception every couple of days and it was always fixed by rebooting.

    • vortexalOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, we’ve actually tried restarting the phone several times and it never fixed the issues. She’s starting to think it’s a problem with everyone else’s phones.

      Also, I edited the post in case your response would have been different.

        • vortexalOP
          1·
          2 years ago

          I’m actually not sure. Her previous phone and my current phone both have the option for calling and texting through both WiFi and data but her new phone doesn’t have the option for either, so I have no idea what it’s using.

            • vortexalOP
              1·
              2 years ago

              I turned both off and the texts still went through, which means that it’s probably using data. Assuming it works the same way that my phone does.

              • Hubi@feddit.de
                2·
                2 years ago

                Maybe you can test if the issue persists with a different sim card. If not, the fault is with either the card or the provider. If the issue persists, I’d start by backing everything up and resetting it to factory settings. If the issue survives the reset, it’s most likely a warranty issue.

                • vortexalOP
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  She thinks it’s the provider because the texting issue doesn’t happen when she’s at home (which she didn’t tell me this beforehand) and it’s only some phones that have trouble telling when she’s online or not.

  • DoktorDelta@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    There’s an option in the Android settings menu called “Reset Network Settings” that might fix this, you should be able to search for it from within the settings menu on her phone.