Owners of LG phones running T-Mobile’s cellular line were stunned by a bizarre software issue that pushed a pop-up alert to their phones every second, essentially rendering them unusable. The message — a statement that “LG IMS is discontinued” or “LG IMS has been discontinued” — affected thousands of LG phone owners with older G-series and V-series phones, as well as newer models like the LG Velvet.
User complaints that surfaced on Twitter and Reddit suggest that restarting or resetting the affected phone won’t fix the problem. Removing the SIM card provides temporary relief, but reinserting it loops back to the same error message. Users who reached out to T-Mobile and LG support controllers on Twitter were told that both companies were aware of the issue and would provide an update on the situation “later tonight.”
How to Fix LG IMS Has Stopped Error on Phone
A fix that just might work, for now
One Reddit user has come up with a fix that appears to be working for some of the affected LG phone users. Here are the steps you need to follow:
- Put the affected LG phone in airplane mode by pulling down the notification shade and tapping on the plane icon.
- Putting the phone in airplane mode should stop the IMS error message from popping up.
- Open the phone’s settings and tap on Apps and Notifications, followed by App Info.
- On the App Info page, click on the three-dot menu icon in the top-right corner of the screen and tap on Show System.
- Look for and tap “com.lge.ims.rcsprovider” on the next page. Doing so will pull up the pre-installed IMS provider app’s detailed overview.
- Once there, tap on the clear cache option, then clear storage, then force stop.
This series of steps may need to be repeated multiple times for the fix to work, at least temporarily. And as per the Reddit thread in question, it might not work for some users at all.
If putting your phone in airplane mode doesn’t stop the barrage, the steps above may not work at all. Even after the temporary fix process seemed to work, some users suggested that the error message reappears when airplane mode is disabled. In short: We hope LG or T-Mobile provide a solution to this problem soon.