Random notifications on S4 causing loss of sanity....please help me!

Steve1163

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A little dramatic on the title front maybe but this issue is beyond infuriating! I have googled this subject to death and 90% of the solutions offered are the same. I am looking for a fresh perspective on this issue. Ok so here is a rundown on what's been going on.....Owned my NZ Vodafone Galaxy S4 for around 4 months with no issues, then just 2 weeks ago it started to announce notification sounds randomly night and day with varying frequency and absolutely nothing showing on the screen anywhere to give a clue about where it was coming from. The screen does not even wake when the notification sounds, you press the power button and there is nothing showing, not even in the pull down menu?

The most common answer given for this issue is to go to individual email account settings and turn off the "postman tone" by setting notifications to silent.......does not work for me! then others suggest going through apps like Yahoo and so on and checking notification settings, I have gone through every single app to do this and still it goes on??? I did switch off GPS yesterday and I nearly got excited because it stopped all day!! I switched on GPS again today and it started again so I thought ok lets switch it off again but the dings continued again Grrrrrr! (PS I am going to refer to the sounds as "dings" from here on in Ok) so back to google and loads more suggestions which were mostly really obvious stuff, one guy said to try Ad-Detector as it identifies which apps may be accessing your system and causing these dings, I downloaded it and it identified a number of apps of which I opened through task manager and switched off notifications but the dings continued regardless....WTF! the phone works flawlessy apart from this issue but this issue is huge for me as I have a sick Mother and pregnant wife also I trade a lot on a website so every time this damn ding sounds I have to check the phone, this is deeply frustrating, I gotta find a fix soon as I am starting to harbour deep feelings of violence towards this phone. I did love this phone and my wife has just bought a Sony Z which is amazing too and it works (so jealous right now). I do love my S4 but this ding thing is completely ruining the experience for me.

Can somebody please help me. I will try just about anything to make it stop but completely wiping the phone does not excite me too much, re-installing everything is a massive nause and I do not want to do it. I have pulled the battery and restarted and so on but this does nothing. I am convinced that if I factory reset the phone, as soon as it boots up it will do exactly the same thing!

Additional information: The notification sound I constantly receive is the same sound that I have set as my standard notification tone.
 
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B. Diddy

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Welcome to Android Central! Ugh, that sounds maddening. Have you tried turning off NFC?
 

B. Diddy

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Have you tried booting into Safe Mode? This will disable all 3rd party apps. If the beeping stops, then you know it was a 3rd party app. If it continues, there's something in the system that's causing it. I know that it won't narrow it down further than that, but at least you'll have some idea.

See the bottom of this article for instructions on Safe Mode: Reset: Samsung Galaxy S 4 | T-Mobile Support
 

Steve1163

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Ok just completed that and although a useful thing to know, it did not help because I have no idea which (if any) is the offending app therefore have no idea which app to uninstall. It is identifying whether or not the phone is faulty or if it is indeed an app causing the issue that I cannot work out. Oh no! I just realised that I should have waited for awhile in safe mode to see if it beeped again....I did not Duh! will do it again now.

Ok that's over an hour now in safe mode and no random dings..........waiting with bated breath!


Apologies if anyone was waiting for a fix update.......it eventually stopped after I did a factory reset, a real pain in the bum but it worked so............
 
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