I feel like I’m going insane, something about the behavior of notifications on the lock screen has changed for me in iOS 16. It’s the same on the actual lock screen, but it’s much easier to screen record the notifications screen that you can pull down from anywhere.

I don’t see any notifications anymore unless I swipe up first. I have missed a ton of things in the last week because I’m not seeing the things on my lock screen anymore that I expect to be there. It’s giving me massive anxiety and I now obsessively perform ridiculous swiping down and up gesture dances all the time, just to be sure my phone isn’t hiding things from me.

The documentation says this:

To see your notifications in Notification Center, do any of the following:

• […]
• On other screens: Swipe down from the top center. Then you can scroll up to see older notifications, if there are any.

This apparently already was the case ever since at least iOS 13 – and I never had any issues with it before the iOS 16 update. It should only affect “older notifications”, but how is that even defined? Based on time? Based on me theoretically already having been able to see it? Will a notification be marked as “old” if I accidentally glance at my phone from an angle where it can unlock upon receiving a notification, even if I don’t interact with it at all? Is the iPhone 14 Pro so much faster and better at FaceID that I now face (ha!) an issue I didn’t run into with the iPhone XS? Is there something weird going on due to the always-on screen where iOS now interprets any notification that comes in while the screen isn’t off (e.g. lying face down) as already seen? Am I experiencing some kind of bug? It certainly feels like one.

Look at the notifications in my video above – the top-most one is still showing “Now” for its timestamp. I triggered it seconds before recording the video, and I did not interact with the phone in-between at all. I didn’t see the notification on my lock screen when unlocking it, and the first thing I did afterwards was recording the video – if I hadn’t swiped up, I’d have no idea that there’s a new notification. (Same applies to the four minute old test notification.)

So much for reducing notification induced stress…