MamaHelen

Hello,

I've owned my 2011 RX350 for about 8 years. For the last several months (I don't know exactly when this problem started) I've noticed that, when I get a phone call on my connected iPhone 11 running iOS 14.7.1, the phone number, with an international prefix (always +1) appears but the caller name does not.

I've traced the problem to the presence of the international prefix. None of the phone numbers in my phone's contacts contain an international prefix, so when those contacts are transferred to the car, the car doesn't have them either. However, when I receive a call, the caller ID data passed from the iPhone to the car contains the prefix. The result is that the car cannot resolve the caller name from the phone number and hence no name appears on the car screen. As a test, I edited one of the contacts stored in the car to include the prefix, then called my iPhone, while connected to the car, from this phone, and the name appeared. Until this problem started, caller names used to appear on my car screen.

My husband has a cheap Android phone. None of his contacts has an international prefix. When he connects his phone to the RX and receives a call, his phone does not pass the international prefix to the RX, so the RX can resolve the caller name from the phone number and the name appears.

I've done a fair bit of digging around the internet trying to find a fix for this problem other than adding the international prefix to all of my contacts (I don't want to go through all that work), but I've come up short. I did notice that, quite a few years ago, there was a problem with the iPhone not passing the international prefix to cars. In cases where people had contacts that had different international prefixes stored with their phone numbers, then the name would not appear on the car screen when a call was received for the opposite reason to mine; i.e., the number passed to the car from the phone did not have the prefix, but all the contacts in the car had prefixes, so the name could not be resolved.

I've posted my problem over on the Apple community forum and haven't received much response. One suggestion was that this is a problem for Lexus to solve, but I really don't see that at all. My suspicion is that Apple made a change to their software several months ago where they started sending international prefixes over Bluetooth and that change was not backward compatible to all cars. Interestingly, perhaps, when I connect my iPhone to my husband's Buick and receive a phone call, the caller name correctly appears on his Buick car screen. So, there might be a Lexus issue lurking here after all?

Sorry for the long first post, but my reason for posting here is to see if other Lexus owners have seen this problem with their iPhones and, if so, what they've done to "fix" it.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

MamaHelen

I've collected additional information on this problem and thought I'd record it here in case anyone becomes interested. My husband got a new Android phone running Android 10 and his phone behaves exactly as mine does now with my car. When his phone is connected and he receives a call from one of his contacts, the phone number appears on the Lexus screen but the name field is blank. Both phones work correctly with his Buick.

Thus the problem is evidently with the Lexus, not Apple or Android. I'm guessing it's related to the age of my car and the bluetooth standards that were in place when it was manufactured. I had thought bluetooth standards were supposed to be backward compatible, but I guess not.

Adding +1 to all the car contacts via the Lexus screen is infeasible. There may be a way to do this in bulk using Apple or Android tools, and I'll check into that, but I suspect it's a fair bit of work. Of course, I'm open to any ideas from the collective here.

Non

Try deleting your phone, and all the other phones that may be paired to your car from the system, and delete all your stored contacts and call history form the car too. Make sure the car doesn't have any phone info, make sure it's blank.
Then pair your phone again. maybe starting from scratch will download your phone contacts again, maybe with the +1 prefixes.
Worth a try.

MamaHelen

Thanks for the suggestion. I've actually deleted my iPhone and contacts once and re-added them with no effect, but I didn't delete my husband's as well. I'll try to delete both of them, and their respective address books, so that the system is "empty" when I get a chance. One thing to note, though, is that neither my iPhone nor my husband's Android has the +1 prefixes in the contacts, so a Bluetooth transfer is not going to put the +1 prefixes in the Lexus.

Another point, I think, is that it appears that when I call comes in, the phone only transfers the number, not the name, to the car. (Or the car only picks up the number, not the name, from the phone.) My hypothesis is that this changed on newer cars. As I noted previously, this problem does not exist with my husband's 2013 Buick.

With Android, I can export contacts from the phone to a spreadsheet, then "mass update" all phone numbers in the spreadsheet to include the international prefix, import those contacts back to the phone, and then transfer them via Bluetooth to the RX. I'm not sure this can be done with Apple, but I'll check. I'd like to avoid corrupting the contacts on both of the phones, so if I could figure out how to use an old, third, phone to transfer contacts to the phonebooks on the car for each of my phones, that would be great. Evidently, each connected phone has its own phonebook, and it used to be possible to populate a phonebook from a "non-activated" device.

This is all starting to sound like a giant PITA, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I can try before I give up.

Again, thanks for the suggestion and thanks for any additional ideas from the collective.

RX in NC

Do what I did back in June 1997 - get rid of your cell phone and never look back. My life is so much simpler and happier now compared to way back then....

salimshah

You and your wife have discovered the secret to true happiness which can be applied to many more things than just the cell phone.

BUT the cliff is much steeper than what it was back in 1997 and the personal cell phone 2021 is much more useful than owning a RX (vehicle).

Salim

RX in NC

^^ You are wrong assuming that my wife agrees with my total disdain for cell phones. She cannot live without hers and has been trying to force another one into my hands ever since I gave them up. After more than 24 years of trying to do that, she should have learned that she cannot force me to change my mind about the subject. Two words describe cell phones perfectly for me - "electronic leash"....