My iPad doesn’t ring via a linked iPhone any more after recent update.

Dear Lotus Pilot,

Since contacting you I had sought direct help from Apple. Spending dozens of hours online with a bulletin board got nowhere. Telephone calls were arranged by Apple Tech Support but never eventuated. I find it amusing that the world’s biggest Tech company by market capitalisation cannot teach its support staff to make a telephone call!

I gave up and when the iOSv18.7 became available, updated my iPhone with this. Guess what, the problem resolved itself. This is what I expected from the outset, that iOSv18.6.2 had bugs in it which Apple would never admit to but quietly engineer out via a future “security” update.

Along the way I had stupid behaviour on my iPad that wouldn’t allow Messages or FaceTime calls to be initiated. I couldn’t enter a password and was presented with a dialogue to contact Tech Support. That always ended up nowhere as the staff had no idea how to fix the problem.

I fixed this problem by running “Reset” which is a very clever system of cleaning the rubbish laying around your iOS but without deleting any of your valuable data. It also offered to upgrade with a more recent version of iOSv16.7.12. This fixed my problem not being able to open Messages and FaceTime.

My only lingering problem is that previous iOS for iPad showed in the dock an icon that opens your “Finder”, giving a quick way to open the desktop from where I could search for the APP I wanted to open. All I get now is a display of the 10 APPS that I have opened recently.

Making and receiving telephone calls from my iPad is now fixed.

Dear Lotus Pilot,

I have used the ability to make and receive calls via my iPhone through my other devices {All my Mac desktops and my iPad} for years. It all worked smoothly until an update on my iPhone last week and with that, the facility died on all devices. The iOS version implicated is 18.6.2.

Receiving Calls

When receiving calls, as long as I am sitting near and operating the computer, when a telephone call comes in, a dialogue inviting me to accept the call comes up in the top right of my monitor. Click the green accept and talk away at the computer monitor and the microphone picks up my voice. Voices on the line come out of the computer’s or iPad’s built in speakers or microphone socket. Total hands free call receiving. Great for conference calls when two or more people at my end can hear the dialogue easily. That’s why this is such a good feature.

Making Calls

Many elements of a device’s interface contains telephone numbers. Contacts may have several numbers stored, web sites have telephone numbers and other places that look like a telephone number, selecting, right mouse will bring up a dialogue with {Dial XXXX YYYY} at the top. Accept this and the device initiates a call via the iPhone.

Again, this is a brilliant facility because you don’t have to type the number in your phone to initiate a call and once stored say in the Contacts APP, use the number a gazillion times without retyping once.

LotusPilot was talking about using FaceTime to handle this but I never have needed to do so. It is a simple, non-video call, just an ordinary speak and listen type of conversation.

Progress so far

I called Apple support and the operator tried various things which did not work and the feedback was that something had become corrupted in my .Mac account. I look forward to them resolving it and to once again enjoy hands free conversations without having to hold my phone to my ear or turn the speaker button on.

I hope that unlike other great features that Apple had decided to make EOL, this is not one of them.

Very good. As it turned out my first intuition turned out to be correct. It was a fault in the iOS of my iPhone and with a subsequent update, the problem was resolved.

I regularly receive calls on my iPad {and a desktop computer as well} by merely answering the dialling set at the top of my screen.

Which if I answer gives the following…

And off you go with your conversation. The interface has changed recently and I guess this was part of the updated code that Apple released with its latest iOS update.

You can initiate calls in a number of ways, including via FaceTime {which I have never used}. The key ones I find useful are…

Right clicking on a number that looks like a telephone number on a web page.

Right clicking on a telephone entry in your Contacts. Be sure to select the desired connection from your multiple telephone numbers stored for each entry.

Strings that look like telephone numbers in the Notes utility. Very handy when going shopping from multiple suppliers in a days outing.

I do hope that seeing Apple has added some enhancements to this facility that they intend to keep it supported.

Cheers.

[Edited by Moderator]