Airplay Icon Disappears on iPhone

i have the same problem too, tho my airplay button didn't reappear when i switched on/off and had to restore my iphone4, now still happens but reappears when switch the phone on/off. c'mon apple sort it out!

Update:
It goes away when the iPhone goes to sleep with nothing streaming to the apple tv.

Then when you wake the phone after some time and start playing music in the ipod app it eventually reappears without
Doing anything. I didn't pay attention to how long it took to reappear but it def did numerous times. It's just not instantaneous.

Maybe this is a crazy question, but: Why should I have to power off and on my iPhone to get back functionality that was there moments ago, then vanished? Is this a bug and, if so, any indication from Apple that it is known or should we be reporting this in some way?

I just discovered something: No matter how I restart, quit and reopen iPod, etc, etc, once Airplay is lost it is lost.

Unless I turn off WiFi in Preferences and then turn it back on.

Could this be a wireless networking problem?

Airplay seems to be unstable just like Airtunes was, though not quite as bad. I have an iTouch, airport express and iMac. Usually airplay works fine. Today i find no Airplay icon in either iTouch or iTunes. I rebooted everything without success.

An hour later, the icons have come back all on their own.

Some suggestions from Apple on what's going on would be welcome. I've been considering buying AppleTV but waiting for news that this is getting some attention.

This happens to me on the iPad as well...usually it just a quick jump over the the "Airplay" menu on the ATV and turning it off then on again...I actually can watch my Airplay button regain functionality when I do it.

I've just found a solution, which works for me on iPhone4 ios 4.2.1
Well, all you have to do is to set your language in settings.app to another and then back...
airplay icon appears again and works like a charm 🙂 Maybe it's easyer than a reboot.

I have an AppleTV2, iPad3G and iPhone4, all running 4.2.1. For some reason my iPad keeps losing the airplay icon from all apps including the multitasking bar. When the icon is there all works perfectly. My iPhone can still see the ATV and my airport express and all are definitely on the same network because other network facilities such as local VNC work fine. Cycling airplane mode, renewing DHCP lease, closing all apps, router reboot and resetting language(respring) doesn't fix the problem. On occasion rebooting the iPad brings back the icon. Im unsure if I'm missing something else to try. I have 2.4GHz on my router and 5GHz on my airport express in bridge, the iPad can connect to either but still no airplay icon.

I just switched from the 5GHz airport express to the 2.4GHz router on the iPad and airplay icon came back. Switched back and its still available. My IP address stayed the same throughout. Weird.

Another data point — my wife's iPhone 4 tends not to lose the Airplay icon, but mine does. Best as I can tell, in a given day she does not use any other WiFi connections other than our home network — 3G cell data the rest of the time. On the other hand, I use a MAC-address-screened and WEP encrypted WiFi network at the university I work at. So far as I have paid attention (the last few weeks), if I reboot the phone to make the Airplay icon appear in the morning, the Airplay icon then vanishes when I leave the house (leaving my network with Airport Express) and will not re-appear when I return home if I have made contact with my work network. It's unclear whether it's just my work network, or any other network.

i have found the wifi on the iphone disconnects from the network so it does not see the apple tv there is a problem with the iphone 4.2 software that needs to be addressed in the next update seams to only happen in the photo part not in ipod

I have the exact same problem. Restarting my iPhone 4 seems to solve the problem temporarily. It would be very nice with a more permanent solution. I guess the only thing to do is wait for apple to fix this bug in a later update of either the iPhone OS or the airport express firmware. I have the latest versions of everything right now. Let's hope the update comes soon.

I have a Touch 4th gen, and my Airplay icon frequently disappears when an album or playlist finishes. I discover it's missing when I start playing something new, and then if I back out to the home screen and go right back into Music, it comes back. (Anyone else wish they could select the destination first, and then play the music?)

Also, on a less frequent basis, the Touch stops playing in mid-song. The Airplay icon disappears, and the Touch is paused. (I've got a thread on that issue here in this forum.) OTOH, iTunes streaming of the same material to the Apple TV is flawless. Never seen it disconnect like that.

I was having similar issue where, intermittently, the Airplay icon would disappear from two iPhones (4 and 3GS) and two iPads, and I could not get it back short of re-starting my router (Cisco Valet Plus M20). It happened on two occasions that I noticed and persisted until router restart.

Today, after poking around this thread and trying a number of the suggestions with no luck, I went into the settings on the *_Cisco router and opened up the wireless settings tab, then clicked on the "basic wireless settings" sub-tab, and set something called the "channel width" to "Auto: 20 or 40 MHz". (It was previously set to 20MHz only.)_*

I seemed to immediately get the Airplay icon back on the iPad after restarting the application.

Don't know if it will hold or if it's relevant in a larger context. Heck, don't even know what channel width is. The help screen on the router seems to say this is connected with Wireless B, G, N networking. For what it's worth.