Airdrop troubles after installing Monterey

Thank you for your input and taking the time to offer the detailed suggestion.

I had gone through pretty much most of those points earlier itself except the last one.

• devices were and are within a few feet of each other
• 2017 MacBook pro with Monterey, iPhone 8 with iOS 15.1
• personal hotspot is off
• both are discoverable by "anyone" when I turn bluetooth on.
• I turned off the firewall setting completely (so the question of the option should not come in). That said, the option of "Block all incoming connections" was disabled.

There was no change in what I could do/see. I can use the phone to see and transfer to the mac, but I cannot see the phone from the mac (and hence cannot even initiate a transfer). This was working prior to the Monterey upgrade, so I am not sure what changed - perhaps some default setting. I'm not sure I recollect the date when 15.1 came out, but it was also a recent upgrade - from the 15.0.x version.

So, I am still left wondering. I've had this happen earlier too, during OS upgrades, though usually it was bidirectional (in that both devices could not communicate with each other). Usually the immediately following upgrade fixes the issue.

Thank you for your input once again. 

The file system check returned 0 exit status code and showed no errors. I would guess that a clean install would have also done a file system check and formatting the disk before installing the OS. Either way, it did not change anything. 

The second option of rebooting in safe mode, at least the steps that are outlined in the linked Apple help page did seem to address the problem. While I kept the shift key pressed till the login screen, I did not see a "Safe mode" indicator anywhere on my screen. However, when I checked bluetooth, I was able to see both devices from the other device.

I rebooted the mac again - this time without pressing the shift key - and once again, the issue has come back - once again, I can only see the mac from the phone but not the phone from the mac.

So, two things - I am assuming that even though the "Shift mode" indicator did not show up, the machine was booted up in safe mode. Second, the devices were able to "see" each other in safe mode but the issue reappears when I boot normally.

Thank you for your input and taking the time. Hopefully this helps point to what is going on - whether it is just an issue on my devices (some settings ?) or whether it is a bug.

Thank you for your input once again. The issue isn't there in a new user account that I created. So, from what I understand you say, it is probably related to a user file in the primary account I use on my machine.

How do I narrow this down to the user file(s) ?

Are these files going to be in $HOME/Library/Preferences ?

Is there a means to "reset" whichever file(s) this is (these are) ?

Thank you

Thank you for the input. I thought the issue had been resolved - for at least a while I had no problem transferring files from one device to another, but the issue is back again - this time in the new account. It has been less than two weeks - and the issue has reappeared.

Sounds like Get Support is the next step.