unable to turn wifi on after 14.0.1 update

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unable to turn wifi on after 14.0.1 update

All worked well after the iOS 14 update, so I applied the 14.0.1 update and now I have no wifi at all. Others have mentioned that the WiFi claims that it’s low security or some such, mine does not do that, the switch on the WiFi settings panel is just greyed out or disabled and cannot be tapped to turn the wifi back on.

If I turn on airplane mode and do a reset of network settings then after the restart it will let me attempt to turn on wifi for the first 10 seconds or so after the restart. Every time I click the switch to enable WiFi the rest of the screen shows for a fraction of a second and then disappears and it goes back to off. Then after 10 seconds or do the switch reverts to it’s disabled or greyed out state. On the control panel screen the wifi shows either as disabled as if I had turned it off or more often with a line through the icon.

Interestingly enough it does appear to actually be on WiFi even though all the displays say it is not and it will not use any data over WiFi. If I look at the connected devices list on my router my phone is listed there and is current. If I ping that IP address it is actually online and returns the ping. If I run an app that does not actually ask the OS if the wifi is enabled or not like “iNet” to scan the local network this actually works and will show me everything else on the local network. It reports that the wifi has the same address that I get from the router.

Any app that checks to see if wifi is enabled before trying to use that subnet though will be told that it is not available and will therefore tell you to enable WiFi before it can do whatever it wants to do.

So the problem is not that wifi isn’t working, or that my antenna came disconnected miraculously at the exact moment I applied the 14.0.1 update but rather there is a bug in the OS that is confused about if my WiFi is enabled or not. I have done the resetting of network settings half a dozen times under various other circumstances all to no avail. I cannot reset everything and reload the phone as without wifi I canon re-apply my iCloud backups.

If anyone has had any success working around this issue while we wait for Apple to get around to figuring it out and pushing out an emergency update please let me know.

iPhone X

Posted on Sep 27, 2020 10:20 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

James Sentman Author

Level 1

84 points

Oct 4, 2020 12:08 PM in response to barberlives123

It actually turned out to be totally the fault of the software update and nothing whatsoever to do with hardware. Indeed, as someone who has worked both the hardware and software side of support in the past suggesting that a brand new hardware fault made itself known for the first time during the restart after applying the update makes me just a little bit angry.

I followed all the instructions for doing what you described. I backed up locally and restored all without any resolution of the problem. As a developer of iPhone software I was able to connect my iPhone to my Mac and view it’s log files. The WiFi daemon process was crashing and restarting constantly. Once I knew this I could do some internet searching with more granularity and was able to find a huge number of others with the same experience. There seems no way for Apple to fix this other than to setup as a new phone and lose all your backups! Luckily there are 3rd party software packages that can delete just the wifi preferences from the backup forcing the phone to re-create them from scratch. once I paid for and ran one of those my phone reloaded and ran perfectly.

There is zero doubt that this is Apple’s problem. Something that can happen to your WiFi preferences will cause the current version of the WiFi system to just crash every time it tries to load your settings. You can setup as totally new and lose everything you have ever done on your phone or use one of the third party tools. Or apple could figure out what is actually causing it and make sure their own software throws some kind of error that can be recovered from as opposed to just crashing over and over and over again.

The specific software I was able to use to recover my phone was “Decipher Backup Repair” and it will run on Windows or Mac OS so that is good at least. It is not the only piece of software that claims to be able to do this, but it is the one I chose and the one that worked for me after doing all that you suggested and more. I would recommend that as a potential fix until Apple pulls their head out of wherever and realizes this is their problem. Watching my iPhone restart the background process about 350 times I know that Apple has a HUGE number of crash reports just from my phone that they could use to fix the issue. All the information they need is there.

It is most definitely not a hardware issue. To suggest so is vaguely insulting to us software developers.

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Answer 2

Oct 4, 2020 8:11 AM in response to James Sentman

Hello James Sentman,

We understand that you are not able to turn on Wi-Fi after updating to iOS 14.0.1. You’re in the right place, we’d be glad to assist in seeking a solution.

Typically if the the Wi-Fi is greyed out and not able to be turned on, it is a hardware issue. If you turn off cellular data, and try to load a website, does it work?

You mentioned not being to back up because of the Wi-Fi, so in the meantime, we suggest following the steps here to back up with a computer: How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Please reach out here for further assistance: Get Support

Take care.

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unable to turn wifi on after 14.0.1 update

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