Q: Handoff and AirDrop not working in El Capitan

I've noticed that all my iOS devices were able to see each other immediately when Airdrop was enabled on all of them, but the iMac was not able to see any of those iOS devices.

These are all new devices with up-to-date OS.

In my case, I spent hours trying to figure this out...  very frustrating!

In the end, I found that if I enabled WiFi but left Bluetooth disabled on the iOS device, then turned on Airdrop (Everyone) on the iOS device, the iOS device auto-enabled (activated) BlueTooth.  And when I looked in Airdrop on the iMac, the iOS device popped up in a couple of seconds.  I tried the same with a second iOS device with the same result.  With the third iOS device, I enabled BlueTooth first, then enabled Airdrop, and the iMac was unable to see the third device.  So I disabled AirDrop and BlueTooth on the third iOS device, then enabled only AirDrop.  It auto-enabled BlueTooth and I was able to see the third iOS device on the iMac.

I hope this helps some of you.

For the record, before I got this to work I tried several of the suggestions in this discussion and others.  Unfortunately none of them seemed to work for me.  But it's quite possible that a combination of solutions is the total answer to get AirDrop on the iMac up and running consistently.

Good Luck!

Thank you so much. One thing to note though is that when you click on Air Drop in Finder it doesn't list the people/ devices it can see, it's only once you click share on something you want to send and choose airdrop that you can see the other devices.

Thanks again

PROBLEM SOLVED:

NO need to delete .plist anything, i spent days or moreover weeks to fixed this simple issue, its a WIFI problem or network connectivity, change your WIFI connectivity password to WPA PERSONAL, NOT WPA/WPA2 PERSONAL, this solved my problem.

UPDATE: with the new iOS 9.3 and new update on El Capitan 10.11.4, the problem solved.

I have the same problem with airdrop and handoff.

I live in Thailand and my mac was set up the year format in Thai.  i did change the year format to be as US. Now my airdrop is work fine, but the handoff still not working

Thank.

I have tried that, and even after the new update Airdrop isn't working at all. On the other hand handsoff is working just fine.

I trief connecting my iphone 6 with other mac books running El Capitan 10.11.3 in an apple store and surprisingly airdrop was working fine on all of them (but the devices weren't connected to the same wifi router or signed in to the same icloud account).

I got in contact with apple "genius" online but even they weren't able to solve this problem.

We can come to a conclusion that the problem is with Mac books and not the iOS devices. So can anyone tell me how can i reset my Mac book to it's factory setting. is there a way to do that without loosing my data, Beacuse i think that way it will solve this annoying problem.

Continuity/Handoff seem to have suffered in the latest release. I find it hard to understand, why. They looked bulletproof in Yosemite. In fact, I was able to restore function to the system that was not working by copying the old cloudpaird into Coreservices until the latest release (10.11.4), which does not work with it.

What I am now seeing in 10.11.4 is that on the system effected, AirDrop has started working and outward handoff to other systems works, incoming connections are not happening. This is independent of the device type - iOS or other Mac OS systems.

All my iOS devices work fine.

I have tried everything from reinstalling the OS and migrating content, logging in and out of iCloud (suffering from a two day mail sync after that,) reconfiguring network and BlueTooth with SMC and parameter reset - all snake oil!

so what is the solution to fix this?

delete the bluetooth plist?

i updated to 10.11.4 and airdrop still not working

I have tried this multiple times and it has never worked.

*** RANT WARNING *** What I find frustrating is that Apple engineers know exactly - by design - what elements would impact the behavior and what to delete to restart and attempt to make it work. But they do not even tell their support people. The problem is simply "presumed not there." I am really unhappy about this.

Same here. updated to 10.11.4 but Airdrop isn't working. But surprisingly last night, while my phone was connected to a bluetooth speaking, hence enabling that Airplay option in the iOS device. I started playing around with Airdrop absentmindedly and to my surprise my mac book detected my phone. But i wasn't able to make any transfers, so i tried switching off and on the handsoff feature, thats it after doing that Airdrop isn't working anymore.

At least this incident made me sure that there isn't anything wrong with my settings or anything, but the source of the problem is still unknown.

Deleting the bluetooth plist isn't a solution. I hope apple comes up with something soon.

Two days ago, no updates done on either device, my Airdrop on my phone started working again (with other phones) and I was also able to Airdrop to my computer.

Ghost in the Machine?

How this annoying — each Apple software release brings sooo many creepy bugs, that I'm doubtful if they have QA in their production pipeline at all!

Starting from Yosemite with each update I spend HOURS browsing through forums trying to find solution to countless bugs.

Because of this I didn't want to update to El Capitan at all! I really think about all Apple updates as a risky thing — you don't know what problems you get after that!

But the need for some apps functionality forced me to update just last week. And let alone a bunch of new little annoying bugs with Finder, WiFi and printers, now I have this nice thing with Airdrop not working at all!!!! I used to use it a lot to drop files between Mac and iPhone. Now I can't! Thank you!

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)

Mac OS 10.11.4 (15E65)

Trying to pair with iPhone 5s running iOS 9.3

Both Mac and iPhone have all available updates installed.

Please deign to give an answer with possible solution!

hello Artoix,

same issue have being facing since el captain initial release. In Yosemite everything was good. Spoke to apple care they said wait for few days so that we can come up with a solution. It's frustratin...

I have to chime in that El Cap has not been "the boss." With the latest 10.11.4 update, I have spurious crashing of Mail and Contacts. Once they crash or become unresponsive, I have to reboot to fix the situation. The one improvement is that the system never shut down with 10.11.3 - it hung on a black screen. The update fixed that. it takes some time, but works now.

Like with everyone else here, the biggest issue all along for me has been Handoff and AirDrop. It is working like clockwork with Yosemite - even if I reboot into it today. 10.11.4 seems to have fixed AirDrop, at least with iOS devices and sometime OS X, but Handoff is only working outbound. Other systems can see my Mac Pro, but there is no inbound Handoff.

Since this is my main desktop machine, inbound is what I need most of the time. Frustrating! I used to fix it by switching Cloudpaird in Coreservices with the Yosemite  version, but that does not work with 10.11.4

Bugreports are in and based on some communications, engineering is checking into it.

But I am still waiting for a fix...

I should note that I do not see these issues on my MacBook Pro Retina and my "Continuity patched" mid 2011 Air 11, but they tend to run fewer apps. My Mac Pro has 12 cores and 48GB with about 20TB of disk (spinning and SSD,) so it is my workhorse 24/7 and runs the most complex set of apps.

Can anyone here will also check if the location works ? I 've been trying to solve this problem with airdrop and I also realize that location services are not working, but when I return to Yosemite the two of them ( airdrop and location ) works without problem.

I do not know if the location is required to make airdrop work, my guess is that something is faulty with the Wifi protocols, drivers or whatever, because the location depend on wifi and airdrop too, it seems the two problems are somehow related, and now I'm 100% sure that the problem is with "El capitan".

As someone already wrote here it occasionally starts or stops working with no apparent logic. When I posted here before I spent an hour trying to solve it: I rebooted iPhone, I rebooted Mac, I cleaned up Bluetooth.plist — nothing helped, Airdrop and Handoff just didn't work. And now — boom and it works, even though I usually do no reboot my Mac and iPhone for many days in a row.

So I don't know, there is some problem obviously here, but what exactly and what's the logic behind it... ?