How do you know it’s being downloaded? Are you on CarPlay? If you unplug your iPhone, the messages aren’t saved. It’s only “live” when you are connected to CarPlay.

 

When I start the car, after the initial Splash message appears, ten or more SMS messages appear on my screen, one after another. Bing, Bing, Bing ... and so on. The messages flood down. if I click on the SMS tag at the top of the screen, it'll show me a list of messages, like what I'd see on my phone. But I don't have any unread messages on my phone. It's almost as if it's looking at what the lsat message was that the Car has stored, and then downloading any that are newer than that.

Oh, and Android phone here, not iPhone.

 

Could this be an Android Auto issue? I don't know for sure, but you might want to go into your Android Auto app settings and look at your messaging options. You may be able to turn that off.

 

Wanted to chime in and say I am having exactly the same behavior on the 2026 CR-V Hybrid Sport Touring model with Android built into the car (so not just Android Auto). It connects to my wife's phone as the primary when I start the car in the garage, pings a ton of notifications for old messages received since the last time the car was started. I drive away, her phone disconnects, mine connects and it does the same notification spree for any old messages my phone received since the last time it connected to the car. Any solutions yet?

 

Not on here. I've looked and can't find a setting in the car or on my phone that I feel relates to this. For me it brings down the most recent 9 messages into the SMS display. It's probably a "nice" feature built in as a standard feature not controlled by a setting. It's annoying but not horrible.

 

I have noticed that under the notifications there is one indicating "check your clock settings, time differences can cause unusual SMS behavior" every time it does it's notification spree.

The clock is fine, matches the phone. But that notification implies to me that Android is detecting the strange behavior and that it isn't expected.

I was going to try having separate profiles, see if putting my phone under one profile and my wife's under a different profile would do anything.

 

I had the same issue until I enabled notifications for text messages in the phone’s Bluetooth settings and made sure message access was allowed during the pairing process.