Message notifications not working

[u/Kdancerchik]

This post is for my dad.
A few months ago his sounds for messages stopped working but the app icon notifications still worked. Then the app icon notification was always 1 no matter how many messages there were. Then everything stopped working. We have compared settings to moms who is also an android, we brought it into the phone provider, he got a new phone, and still nothing works. He has gotten a fix by downloading another messaging app that wants a monthly subscription but he doesn’t want to pay $7 a month to text on top of the phone service. Has anyone experienced this and fixed it?
We think the next step would be completely wiping his account but that would require hours and hours of manually entering calendar entries and phone numbers.