Airdrop Not working iPhone 13 Pro Max

This problem seems to be caused by the different handling of contacts on the phone and iCloud. When you log out of your iCloud account, you will be asked if you want to merge contacts of your phone and the one in iCloud or cancel.

Choose merge and log out from your iCloud account, restart, and log in your iCloud account will sync the contacts.

Hope it will help.

As a temporary solution I added a new contact for my wife as the name of her phone with the same details and linked (bottom of contact creation) it to her original contact and voila it worked. Not a solution for a large number of contacts but did work. Hope apple fixes soon.

thanks

E

Just came here to find a solution to the exact same problem between my iPhone 13 Pro and my wife’s iPhone 11. Easily discoverable but neither phone would ever prompt to accept anything from the other.

I had iCloud contacts enabled and she didn’t. I disabled and re-enabled my iCloud contacts while also enabling her’s. Airdrop worked immediately.

It would seem local contacts are enough to discover other people but you need the contact in iCloud for Airdrop to actually perform its function?

Thanks 4989ken!

Just so you know. That’s absolutely garbage.

An intricate built in function of the OS doesn’t work, so we should destroy all of our stored network connection information is not an acceptable response. Not to mention it NEVER WORKS!!!

Airdrop is an effing joke and needs to be fixed. It’s 2021 for crying out loud

I had the same issue with my iPhone 13 pro and my partner’s iPhone 11 Pro. The problem seems to be with the contacts themselves as when you choose the contact picture for airdrop the option keeps on “waiting” forever. However, if you choose the airdrop sharing option, then under “other people”, the phone itself is there and airdrop works with it. This confirms there’s no problem with the radios as such. What I did, after having tried everything, I went to the accounts option under settings/contacts and removed all my contacts from the iPhone itself by toggling off the option. After all contacts were removed from the iPhone I toggled it back on. This fixed the problem for me.

The Airdrop wasn’t working after I transferred my data to the iPhone 13. The solution turned out to be very simple. Go to the Contacts page and click on “Groups” (it’s at the top left hand side). Make sure “All iCloud” is checked. When I did that, everything worked perfectly.

Thank you @Andrzej78! This 100% solved the problem. After a day of debugging, resetting network settings, turning on/off wifi and bluetooth, factory resetting my phone and nothing working, these instructions helped perfectly.

As mentioned, switch off iCloud contacts sync, select "Keep on phone", switch on iCloud contacts sync, select "Merge". Everything works as expected after that.

I had to back up iCloud after following the steps you have described for the Airdrop on my iPhone13 Pro Max to work again.

Thanks to everyone who have posted helpful remedies for this problem. It seems to be a common issue!!

So, I had the same issue where I upgraded my wife’s phone to a new 13 Pro. Other people could AirDrop to us, but we couldn’t AirDrop between us. When checking, I found that each time I tried to connect, there were 2 different accounts. It could send to one that was considered an “other account” but not to the actual account. Reading comments in this chat, I thought that it could be related to iCloud. I took my wife’s iPhone and logged her off of iCloud. After logging her back into iCloud, it worked! Also without the duplicate accounts. I’m thinking that the there was something in the migration from her old iPhone to the new iPhone 13 Pro that caused this issue. I’m optimistic that this has resolved the issue.

I have same problem. I got iPhone 13 pro max as gift to girlfriend. When sending from mine iPhone 13 mini than she time to time see prompt only when I cancel sending or shortly after on my phone it shows that recipient has declined receiving. Sending to me works perfectly. Only short time solution is to restart hers iPhone 13 pro max. I am waiting for fix of this problem.

Me to upgraded my wife from 11 pro max to 13 pro max now I can’t air drop her from my 12 pro max

factory reset both phones

even tried beta software on both phones and have same issue I think it’a software issue look iPhone.

Hard to believe this is an "Apple Recommended" solution. I just did this, and now my iMac Pro doesn't even appear as an AirDrop destination on my iPhone 13 Pro Max. AND I can't connect the two via Bluetooth; I get an error message on my phone saying that my iMac Pro "is not supported". What kind of crap is that? I wasn't having any problems until I upgraded to Monterey —which I had to do because Safari stopped working, meaning I've replaced one connection problem with another.

This kind of crap is why I originally switched to the Mac.

Apple is a normal brand now… nothin special. Been with them since IPhone 3… considering Samsung… the problems are just too mucch. I don’t see them working them. They think they are still the GOD of the industry. It was good.. seems it’s just burnout now.

iPhone 13pro and M1 MacBook Pro. Both show up on the other's Airdrop but I am unable to transfer anything using Airdrop. Tried resetting, restarting, rebooting. Nothing works. Very frustrated and disappointed knowing that so many others having the same problems. There was no problem when I was using AirDrop on older devices (had iPhone 6+ and MacBook Air 2012. Something not quite right. Does anyone have a fix?

Just found exactly the same thing yesterday, also with Monterey. Very strange and definitely worth fixing in the next update. Royal pain to turn off VPN just to use AirDrop and then turn it back on afterwards.