AirDrop is not working after new iOS 17 update

Air drop is constantly failing to transfer data after receiving of ios 17.1. Neither hard reset nor other alternative methods are working. Airdrop on 16.3 works like a charm. Please sort this bug asap.

my last post was done when I was away from home on cell coverage. I stated I was able to transfer photos as long as I turned cell off. Now I’m home and tried transferring photos from my iPhone to iPad and the reverse and I can even when cell is turned off. So it appears that it’s something to do with not being connected to WiFi, not hotspot.

Wanda, I don't have a VPN on my iPhone either but, I do use a VPN on my iPad and cannot airdrop between the two devices. But, as soon as I turn off the VPN on the iPad, I can airdrop back and forth between the two devices. When the VPN is on the iPad I get "declined" when trying to airdrop from the iPhone SE to the iPad and when I try to airdrop from the iPad I get "No People Found". This problem did occur until the last few iOs updates.

Nope that didn’t do it.

i’m having problems getting my phone recognized by an iMac. I can upload a file from my phone to the iMac which is at 13.6.1 but I can’t send a file from the Mac to my iPhone which was just upgraded to 17.

I tried switching airplane mode on and off and that didn’t make any difference.

I still can’t transfer from iMac to iPhone with 17

I tried resetting my iPhone to the previous backup and the software would not let me do that and I didn’t want to lose all the data on my phone again so Im waiting until they fix this however I have deadlines that are coming up and I need to be able to airdrop instead of waiting an hour for a 4.4 gig file to upload.

I tried airdropping a file from the machine that was giving me trouble and I selected “bringing devices together“ in general settings on my phone and I tapped my phone against the iMac and it worked!! At first I didn’t feel I would need to do that since I was normally able to airdrop located closely to the computer but I’m very pleased to find that this works for me. How about you?

Initself this did not work. I used all suggestions in the posts here:

sync of contacts between phone and iCloud

screen time settings in two stages as above and;

switching the vpn app off and the vpn toggle off as it sometimes comes back on by itself

two phones have to be within two centimetres of each other longways, not end to end. Move apart and phone drops off screen.

combination of all these worked, and keeps working. Some suggestions only worked one time then stopped, this keeps working. iOS 17.1.2

Fixed photo Airdrop between my iPhone & iPad!

Short version: remove duplicate contact entries of yourself in both devices in the Contacts app.

To fix ‘Find My’ app device offline problem between the iPhone & iPad, share your location with yourself and use Family Sharing to link both Apple ID’s as a family member on both devices.

Longer version:

Before I updated to iOS 17.1, I used airdrop everyday to send photos between iPhone & ipad for work, it was fast and worked perfectly, however I had noticed that iPhone’s Airdrop request icon on my iPad had a super old contact photo, which would never update, so ignored. This may have been a problem others noticed in iOS 16.

The update to iOS 17 stopped Airdrop working, the Share button worked but the Airdrop button did nothing, or the screen turned white. What I’ve come to understand, Airdrop between devices uses the Contacts entries of both devices. I found I had 3 separate contacts listed for myself in my iPhone, one was just an email (which ended up being the reason for the old icon pic) once I linked duplicate contact entries in both devices Airdropped worked again (plus the old icon pic was gone). I think Airdrop was confused which Contact was sending and which was receiving.

Before coming to this conclusion I wanted to see if I could use ‘Find My’ app to see the iPhone from the iPad and vice versa making sure there was a viable connection between the 2 devices. It also didn’t work, both devices appeared offline, even when iCloud and sharing was On. The problem is my iPhone and iPad use different Apple ID’s but they’re merged and both Apple ID email addresses appear in my Contacts entry, however the only way to see the devices is to treat each of the ‘Me’ contact entries as a friend that needs to be shared with, in ‘Maps’ I shared the ‘Me’ Apple ID 1 location with Apple ID 2, and also used Family Sharing to add ‘Me’ Apple ID 1 to Apple ID 2 as a family member on each device. Now I can see all my devices and locations across the 2 devices and my iMac can see both iPhone and iPad locations.

AirDrop is not working for me trying to send photos I take with iPhone 13 Pro to a MBA M1 or iMac M1. I have the latest updates on all devices. I select the photo(s), my MBA/iMac AirDrop shows up as the very first entry in quick buttons, but when I touch it, it attempts to send and pretty soon after gives the word "FAILED" in red. I do not have a VPN and have tried pretty much everything listed in this thread, nothing can get it to work. Pretty frustrating.

This is the only solution that has worked for me:

Do a hard reset and do not restore from iCloud. Manually download and reconfigure all apps. Signing in with Apple ID allows all photos and messages to sync. **Airdrop now works**

Clearly there is something causing the problem in the apps that the iCloud restore brings back.

Now IOS 17.2. Problem still NOT fixed! Airdrop stooped to work properly on my iphone 12 after installing ios17.

Inside PHOTOS or MESSAGE apps I can no longer transfer photos to other people from my contacts OR everyone. The app just freezes and becomes NON RESPONSIVE when you try to airdrop the photos.

I have also wasted my time trying everything I could find in the apple and internet sites!

Very unfortunate this lack of care with customers that have slightly older phones (iPhone 12)!

Apple should pay more attention to these feedbacks!

For one, I will be very cautious with ANY new update from this point on …

Not worth if we lose previously available functionality and time to try to fix a problem that DID NOT EXISTED BEFORE!

After the latest update every time I share a video from my Sony to my iPhone it saves it on the files app instead of photos, nothing has change on both devices, I try also to airdrop it from my Mac and the same issue… does anybody else have this issue and how you solve it?

This is the only solution that has worked for me:

Do a hard reset and do not restore from iCloud. Manually download and reconfigure all apps. Signing in with Apple ID allows all photos and messages to sync. **Airdrop now works**

Clearly there is something causing the problem in the apps that the iCloud restore brings back.

@Maksi When you say "hard reset" do you mean erase your device? Then manually sign in with your Apple ID, do not restoring anything, and then reinstall every app from scratch and enter your logins for every app? That is very laborious and time consuming.

I use AirDrop infrequently. A better solution for me for the time being is to just text the photos to myself that I want to transfer from one device to another.

@Dasi22ind you may be on to something about clearing space in iCloud. I'm near max storage on my 200GB plan with 5 family members. Twice in the past month I've had to delete picts/videos as my storage was full and I'm probably 99% full now.

Unfortunately yes, a hard reset without a icloud restore is the only actual fix that seems to work for this issue. As an IT guy, I understand this is a laborious solution but it’s also the only one I found that works.