Samsung Galaxy S21 vibration not working on One UI 4 (Android 12) with new notifications, but there's a workaround

The Samsung Galaxy S21 series is one of the best smartphones available in the market right now. Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G chipset, the phone was launched in January this year with Android 11 out of the box.

Recently, Samsung updated the entire series to One UI 4 based on Android 12. Despite testing out the beta version of One UI 4 for quite a while, it looks like some bugs like the Android UI lagging intermittently made their way through to the stable release.

With that being said, it looks like Galaxy S21 users are affected by another bug with users reporting (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) that vibration for notifications is not working after they updated to Android 12 based One UI 4.

Those affected say they are missing out on important notifications and messages because of the issue. People have tried fiddling with the settings, tried toggling the vibration for notification option, and even reset their phone but to no avail.

Galaxy S21 users suggest that only the vibration for notifications settings is affected since the device does vibrate when receiving a phone call.

Since the update, my Galaxy 21 will not vibrate when I get a notification. It vibrates on calls but just not at all for any notification, neither when the setting is just on vibrate or along with the call sound. I restarted my phone multiple times, toggled all of the notification and vibration specific settings, but I still can’t get it to vibrate.
(Source)

I live my life with my phone on vibrate and very rarely have my phone in loud. I’m not sure when this issue started coming up and it might have been before the update. The issue is everytime I have a notification, my phone doesn’t vibrate at all to let me know. Doesn’t matter what notification, nothing comes up. The motor is still working though, when I go into settings and change the vibration notification sound it vibrates and shows me what I can have plus when I go into developer settings and try to vibrate the phone it all works. It’s only when I get a notification nothing happens.
(Source)

It is interesting to note that a similar issue was reported during the One UI 4 Beta test with Samsung’s virtual assistant, Bixby. Users said they did not get any vibration feedback when pressing the power button to launch Bixby.

Coming back to the issue at hand, it turns out that a Reddit user has a workaround that fixed the Galaxy S21 vibration issue for some.

try below steps
settings > notifications > More under recently sent > change the list from most recent to all > three dots > show system apps > Android system > select Allow sound and vibration under alerts
(Source)

With Samsung yet to acknowledge the Galaxy S21 vibration issue, it looks like those unaware of the workaround will have a wait a bit more before the issue is fixed. When they do, we will update this space so make sure to stay tuned.

In the meantime, be sure to check our dedicated Samsung Galaxy S21 tracker and One UI 4 bug tracker. Also, do let us know if the workaround fixed the Samsung Galaxy S21 vibration issue for you in the comments down below.

Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Samsung Section so be sure to follow them as well.

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