Custom voicemail greeting broken after upgrade to iOS 17.2

This works with iOS 17.2.1… sometimes. If I power down the phone for any reason, when it restarts (even with Live VM off), there’s a 95+% chance that my custom greeting won’t get activated. Curiously, if I call into my voicemail, the custom greeting is there and active.

As to who is “responsible,” the optics of the situation is that a feature which was fully functional under the final release of iOS 16 was “broken” by upgrading to iOS 17. Ultimately it is an unsatisfactory customer experience which is occurring on an Apple device with the latest version of their operating system.

I just had a rather lengthy discussion with one of the network engineering support people at my carrier. According to him, they investigated my issue with Error 1034 without detecting any problems at their end, including a full check on the provisioning of my iPhone.

In particular, he thought it was quite curious that the custom voicemail greeting feature was working perfectly under iOS 16 but “broke” under iOS 17. In any event, his suggestion was to back up my phone, reinitialize it, and then restore it… as if I have the time to bother doing that.

As I said in a previous post, ultimately this is a poor customer experience with an Apple device. I performed software update and a basic phone feature no longer functions as advertised. As a “valued customer,” it’s really that simple.

Yep, it appears that the Live Voicemail feature is causing the problem. When I turned it off, my iPhone was able to detect that I have a custom voicemail greeting and enable it.

I also discovered that I could enable my custom voicemail greeting if I turned off cellular service and used WiFi (with WiFi Calling turned on).

So much for this being a “carrier issue.” 🙄

The custom voicemail greeting problem persists in iOS 17.3. At least for me, it does not appear to be rectified by disabling the Live Voicemail feature. In fact, the only way I can select my custom voicemail message in the phone app is to turn off cellular data, cold reboot the phone, connect to Wi-Fi (with Wi-Fi calling enabled), and then select the custom greeting. Then I can reenable cellular data service.

Even more curious is that my sister has exactly this same custom voicemail greeting problem, except she has an iPhone 14 (I have a 13 Pro) and she uses a different cellular carrier. The only commonality is iOS 17.3.

I think I already had cellphone data disabled when I tried turning off Live VM, so I was using Wi-Fi connectivity only at the time. With further investigation, it appears that, at least in my (and my sister’s) case, Live VM is not causing the problem. Whatever is causing it is not carrier-specific nor model specific, as I described previously.

How curious… iOS 17.4 (and 17.4.1) “magically” fixes this problem. So much for the “blame the carrier” game.

So let me understand this: my custom voicemail greeting was working correctly until this evening when I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 17.2. After the upgrade, my custom voicemail greeting is “broken,” and somehow it’s the carrier’s problem? That’s hilarious.