Mobile data issues since Android 16 update

NobleKnight89

Good afternoon,

I've been having lots of mobile data issues since I updated to Android 16 in October of 2025. For whatever reason, whenever my phone restarts, my mobile data completely stops working unless I open the Sim card tray and close it again. Nothing else works to restore my mobile data, and it happens every single time my phone restarts. Additionally, I almost never get media files that others try to send me. If they send me a media file when my mobile data is off, and I turn the mobile data on, I cannot go back and download the file or see it in any way other than the download icon that shows that a media file is there. And if they have an Android phone, I can occasionally receive media files if my mobile data is on before they send the file, but if they have an iPhone, I am never able to see their media files, even if my mobile data is on before they send it.

Can someone help me figure out what is going on? These issues started the instant I updated to Android 16. I have a Samsung Galaxy A15 5G (2024), and my Sim card is from 2020. I'm on a prepaid plan.

I've tried everything I could find online; restarting the phone, toggling airplane mode, changing APN info, and several other things, and nothing is fixing these issues.

SynthpopAddict

I'm wondering if there's a hardware issue with the phone, since you reported constantly having to fiddle with the SIM card tray to restore missing data connection. You could try getting a new SIM card from a corporate Verizon store (3rd party stores may or may not stock SIM cards) as replacement SIM cards are free at corporate stores. If your current SIM card is from 2020, it sounds as if you moved it from an older phone to the A15, and moving an old SIM card from one phone to another is no longer supported.

A lot of people text in RCS or other encrypted format these days, as all "modern" texting is sent over the internet and uses data - they aren't traditional SMS/MMS texts (unencrypted) - so another possibility is a provisioning issue with your account where Verizon needs to tweak with something on their end so your phone can use RCS if you haven't already enabled RCS. iMessage is its own custom format, which the newer versions of Android can decode, but there's obviously some disconnect where your phone isn't doing it.