New iPhone 12 Bluetooth pairing problems

I am the owner of a new Phone 12 and I had the pairing issue too. It turned out to be an update issue and once I installed it, it worked.

If this is for a homewerks bathroom fan I just wanted to suggest what worked for me. Going to this URL: https://www.homewerks.com/customer-support#form and filling out the form. They contacted me the next day but be careful, all their replies went into my junk/spam folder so for a week I didn't think they were responding back.

Well, the manual or the website for the speaker probably has the answer on how many devices it can be paired to simultaneously and how to reset it. I have one speaker that can be paired to 5 sources, but a headset I have can only be 2.

The speaker is basic in function and is in pairing mode as soon as you switch it on.

Hence why I took the step of disconnecting and removing it’s pairing from my old iPhone, to ensure it wasn’t connected to anything else.

Did you put the speaker into pairing mode? Did you try resetting the speaker to factory settings? Most USB devices have a (usually small) limit to the number of devices they can be paired with.

Actually, Apple has NO ONE looking at any pages in this user-to-user forum. From all of the articles I have seen there is a problem with the Bluetooth in the Homewerk speaker/fans, and there isn’t anything Apple can do about the fact that the fans have not implemented the Bluetooth standard correctly.

So it really was a Homewerks problem and not an iPhone (or Android) problem after all!

I don’t think it’s a backwards compatibility problem, because thousands of BT devices work with the latest iPhones. More likely Homewerks used a non-standard/undocumented feature of BT that was not carried over to the latest standard. This is pretty common in technology.

So I have done my due diligence - called and emailed Homewerks Tech Support AND, much to my amazement, they actually called me back. It is definitely an Apple issue - a blue tooth issue with the 12. This is what Apple told Homewerks and this is what I was told. And again, for the record I have had iPhone 7's, 10's, 10S, and 11's in this home and ALL of them worked nicely with the Homewerks devices. So, while we will never hear or know the story from Apple, we will probably have to live with the incompatibility until some iPhone update shows up and then all of a sudden it will work again. OR Apple will come out with a Bluetooth bathroom fan and we will have to buy it. replace the Homewerks device, and can have tunes in the can all over again.

It's unlikely that we ALL have a broken phone.....

Clearly there's an issue with certain types of speakers connecting to the newer iPhones.

Given that I have 3 iPhones - 1 old iPhone X, an iPhone 12 (work phone) and a new iPhone 12 Pro and its only the two iPhone 12's that this speaker wont connect to, that tells me there's an issue with the iPhone 12's connecting to some Bluetooth devices in general.

DJG77 wrote:

I'm having the same issue with a BT-280 Mini Mushroom bluetooth speaker.

Connects fine on my old iPhone X.

Will absolutely not connect to my iPhone 12 Pro.

I've tried everything - disconnected it from the old phone, switched my Bluetooth on and off, re-booted my phone and the speaker, updated my software. Nothing has worked. So this has to be an Apple glitch.

It's driving me insane

Did you try the basic step of putting the speaker into Pairing mode? Did you consider that the speaker may have filled its “pairing table”, and needs to be cleared to factory settings?

LDawg61 wrote:

There is clearly a bluetooth issue with the 12 as evidenced by this chain - as well as my own attempt with pairing...common sense wins here. The folks in this chain aren't idiots, we all just want our phone to do what it's supposed to do. We will all just have to wait for some update issued with some other guise of a fix and it will then work again

[Edited by Moderator]

Yes, there are problems with Bluetooth and some (not all) devices.

However, there are a lot of different problems in this thread. And, believe it or not, there are some users who don’t know that you must put a device into Pairing mode to get it to connect with another device the first time, or if they know they didn’t think of it. And that’s all I was pointing out. Not everyone is as knowledgeable as you are.

Homewerks posted in another thread that they think they have a solution, and you should contact their support.

You cannot pair any iPhone with any computer using Bluetooth, except to use the phone as a wireless hotspot. However, you can transfer content between an iPhone and a Mac using Airdrop or iCloud.

Have you put the headset into Pairing mode? It will only show in the list if it is in pairing mode.