Airdrop on iPhone 11 Pro Max suddenly not working - keeps staying in "receiving off"

Question

Airdrop on iPhone 11 Pro Max suddenly not working - keeps staying in "receiving off"

I have googled this extensively. I have completed all the suggestions of turning off / on the WiFi and Bluetooth. I have reset the network settings. I've turned off the phone. I have opened control center and clicked on the airdrop button to change it to "Contacts Only" and it will not update what I am selecting. Goes out of the window - click it again. Nothing. I successfully airdropped many photos from iPhone to Mac and had no issue and last night it just suddenly stopped working. My MAC Air (super old - mid 2013) running on macOS Catalina V 10.15.7) and updated my iPhone to the latest software too (V14.0.1) and still cannot get this working. I am super frustrated! i don't want to have to dig through thousands of pictures stored in "import" on photos to pull the pictures I need to transfer to a specific folder. That would take forward.

I literally change it to "contacts only", go out of the Airdrop area, go back in and it's back to "receiving off". i managed to transfer 4 photos successfully but then when I tried a second time, didn't work.

Someone please help!

iPhone 11 Pro Max

Posted on Oct 2, 2020 12:41 PM

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Answer 1

ryane77

Community Specialist

Oct 8, 2020 6:27 AM in response to kristylanderson

Hi kristylanderson,

It's understandable to want to make sure AirDrop is working, and we'll be happy to help out. As we understand it, you've been able to use AirDrop before, but recently you're finding that the Mac setting changes to "Receiving Off" unexpectedly. Is that correct, or is that happening on the iPhone?

You mentioned restarting your iPhone. To double-check, have you tried restarting both the Mac and iPhone together? For AirDrop issues, restarting all of the affected devices might be helpful.

Depending on how that goes, a good next step would be to set up a temporary administrator account on your Mac and sign in there to test it out. Knowing how it works there and whether your settings are retained would help in determining if this is a system-wide issue or if it may have a user-specific cause. Here's how to Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac. Then sign in to the newly-created account and test it out to see how it works.

Keep us updated.

Cheers.

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Airdrop on iPhone 11 Pro Max suddenly not working - keeps staying in "receiving off"

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