Airdrop: Why is my iPhone iOS 12.4.1 not recognized by MacMini 10.14.6?

Question

Airdrop: Why is my iPhone iOS 12.4.1 not recognized by MacMini 10.14.6?

I am trying to Airdrop content from my MacMini (late2014) to my iPhone 8. My iPhone is not recognized by MacMini Airdrop.

Without changing any settings, I can Airdrop from my MacMini onto another iPhone 6 and then Airdrop from there onto my iPhone 8.

I don't know if this is related, but my iPhone is not automatically pairing with my MacMini with BlueTooth. After connecting Bluetooth manually, Airdrop on MacMini still does not recognize my iPhone.

I've gone through all of the settings listed on Apple Support for using AirDrop on Your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203106

and other suggestions on the phone such as Off/On, BlueTooth Off/On, Personal Hotspot Off, Airdrop set to Everyone, sign out of iCloud and back in. And on MacMini assuring it Allows all Incoming Connections (Firewall) , confirming all devices are on the same network, turning MacMini Bluetooth On/Off (and by the way other Bluetooth devices do automatically connect to the MacMini)

iPhone 8

Posted on Sep 2, 2019 4:13 AM

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stevenfrombellefontaine Author

Level 1

16 points

Sep 14, 2019 4:59 AM in response to stevenfrombellefontaine

Apple's excellent Phone Support helped me solve this issue. I started with iPhone support and got switched over to Mac support when they confirmed that AirDrop was working between my phone & another phone. They walked me through several checks to see why my phone wasn't being recognized by my computer. We did all of the standard "help" checks and nothing worked. So they started down other possible causes that they knew about.

The problem was that months ago, I had blocked my phone number. And I hadn't used AirDrop between my computer and phone since that time.

So why would I have blocked my own phone? Clever telemarketer/scammers. I don't know how they did it, but I was getting calls that showed as coming from my phone number and when I answered the telemarketing/scam began. I checked online and apparently that is possible through some masking tactics. Only solution I found was to block my contact for myself. After all, when would I ever call myself? Well that worked OK, but the unintended consequence was that AirDrop apparently disallows blocked contacts - a pretty good idea actually, but why it didn't do that between phones is a mystery. And yes, we had tried AirDrop on both the Everyone and Contacts only Settings in Mac & iOS.

Thanks Apple.

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