Over the course of the last few days my wife and I have gone from the last version of iOS 11 to iOS 12.0.1 on three devices - her iPhone SE, my iPhone 7+ and my first-version iPad Pro (the big one). In general things looked to have gone pretty well until whe went to share a contact card with me last night via Air Drop. We soon figured out that our devices could not “see” each other unless we set AirDrop to “Everyone” rather than “Contacts Only” and even when one device could see another the actual transfer would fail with an immediate “declined” on the sending device and no response or input of any kind on the receiving device.
I got on Apple Support Chat and spent probably an hour working (or trying to work) the problem last night. This involved both first and second tier support folks.
I tried toggling AirDrop off then on again and restarting devices - with no change. I also learned that AirDrop between any of these three iOS devices and my MacBook Pro 15 with Touch Bar (running High Sierra) worked just fine, thank you.
At the end of chatting late last night I was left with a “we’ll have Engineering” call you tomorrow and we set up a call time.
This morning after we got sorted why they couldn’t get through to me on my land line (“Security Screen on CenturyLink”) I wound up talking to a first-level tech (again) and he walked me through pretty much the same stuff as we’d done the night before....and then decided that the next step was a restore all from backup - which I know from prior sad experience is a multi-hour-long process fraught with its own issues - something I was unwilling to do on three devices.
I kept asking him what this “declined” thing actually was telling me over and over and he couln’t tell me. Finally he passed me on to a second level advisor who was much less constrained by the script or whatever he had in front of him. So....I started off explaining the whole thing again, since in the course of all that the second level didn’t get that I was able to AirDrop with my Mac no problem from the prior guy.
After some more discussion he wanted to do “reset settings” - which is a little easier to recover from. So I opted to go ahead and do that from the iPad (since it would have less to recreate afterward). The upshot of that exercise was that AirDrop was now working between the iPad and my 7+ but not my wife’s SE. We called that progress and the fellow from Apple said he’d call back to check on our progress in an hour while I discussed with my wife about doing the reset settings on her phone.
We went ahead and did that on her SE as well and now have AirDrop working apparently in all directions (with “Contacts Only” as it should). We are still recovering from the erased settings - resetting Touch ID and passcodes, background screens, WiFi passwords (though the intra-device sharing there helped me get the passwords to both sides of our home network in the various places it needs to be).
As I write this my wife’s SE is spending an inordiate amount of time confirming her new unlock passcode (the old one was only 4 digits - no way to set that up directly from new) with iCloud but we otherwise have mostly recovered. When that finally breaks loose we can get more fingerprints and other stuff (like our choices of sounds for various actions) set back up.
Sheesh!
I got on Apple Support Chat and spent probably an hour working (or trying to work) the problem last night. This involved both first and second tier support folks.
I tried toggling AirDrop off then on again and restarting devices - with no change. I also learned that AirDrop between any of these three iOS devices and my MacBook Pro 15 with Touch Bar (running High Sierra) worked just fine, thank you.
At the end of chatting late last night I was left with a “we’ll have Engineering” call you tomorrow and we set up a call time.
This morning after we got sorted why they couldn’t get through to me on my land line (“Security Screen on CenturyLink”) I wound up talking to a first-level tech (again) and he walked me through pretty much the same stuff as we’d done the night before....and then decided that the next step was a restore all from backup - which I know from prior sad experience is a multi-hour-long process fraught with its own issues - something I was unwilling to do on three devices.
I kept asking him what this “declined” thing actually was telling me over and over and he couln’t tell me. Finally he passed me on to a second level advisor who was much less constrained by the script or whatever he had in front of him. So....I started off explaining the whole thing again, since in the course of all that the second level didn’t get that I was able to AirDrop with my Mac no problem from the prior guy.
After some more discussion he wanted to do “reset settings” - which is a little easier to recover from. So I opted to go ahead and do that from the iPad (since it would have less to recreate afterward). The upshot of that exercise was that AirDrop was now working between the iPad and my 7+ but not my wife’s SE. We called that progress and the fellow from Apple said he’d call back to check on our progress in an hour while I discussed with my wife about doing the reset settings on her phone.
We went ahead and did that on her SE as well and now have AirDrop working apparently in all directions (with “Contacts Only” as it should). We are still recovering from the erased settings - resetting Touch ID and passcodes, background screens, WiFi passwords (though the intra-device sharing there helped me get the passwords to both sides of our home network in the various places it needs to be).
As I write this my wife’s SE is spending an inordiate amount of time confirming her new unlock passcode (the old one was only 4 digits - no way to set that up directly from new) with iCloud but we otherwise have mostly recovered. When that finally breaks loose we can get more fingerprints and other stuff (like our choices of sounds for various actions) set back up.
Sheesh!
