wifi sync not working after ios6 update

I'd like to share my experience with this thread. It may help others to work around this Apple nightmare.

If I click on the "Devices" button next to the "Done" button in the main iTunes window, select my iPhone 5 and then click on "Sync" in the window containing my iPhone info, iTunes says it's looking for my iPhone, then my iPhone drops from the list of devices. All that is left is my iPad. The only way to get it back in the "Devices" list (which, actually, now says "iPad," since it is the only thing left after iTunes decided to remove my iPhone), is to connect my iPhone via the USB cable (or use Windows services - explained below). Arghh!!

With my iPad being the only device left recognized by iTunes, I can initiate a sync via my iPad, by clicking on "Sync Now" Under General -> iTunes Wi-Fi Sync. It completes successfully. Subsequently syncing from my PC also works. Upon closing iTunes and reopening it, my iPad no longer appears as a device in iTunes. Either connecting to the PC via USB cable or first shutting down iTunes, then going into "services.msc" (type this in the "run" field in older versions of Windows or the search box in Windows 7), restarting the "Apple Mobile Device" service and then restarting iTunes, makes it appear in iTunes again. This also makes my iPhone reappear. Weird!

But, strangely, after getting both my iPhone and my iPad to reappear in iTunes, I can initiate a sync with either one via my PC without either of them disappearing!! Very inconsistent! but, at least, now, I know how to get them to reappear in iTunes.

Edit to my previous post: I closed iTunes and waited for about 15 minutes. Then, I reopened iTunes to find that neither my iPhone nor my iPad was present. So, I shut down iTunes, opened Windows Services, as I described above, restarted the “Apple Mobile Device” service, reopened iTunes, and voila, both devices were present. It appears that the “Apple Mobile Device” service is crashing!!!

Is not the post with steps 1 to 4a about getting Wifi working in iPhone in general? Is it related to wireless sync with our PC or Mac?

@brablc

Yes. That user posted in the wrong discussion thread. He was explaining how to get the iPhone to be recognized as a hotpot by other devices running wi-fi. Disregard his post.

@Glenn231

Thanks for the summary post. I miss just one think - what do you see on iPhone -> General -> iTunes Wi-Fi Sync screen? I can see: To enable Wi-Fi syncing with iTunes, connect to iTunes on your computer using cable and click on "Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi".

If I do this on my Mac in iTunes, press Apply and Sync I see no change in iPhone, I believe the iPhone simply does not get the right signal over the cable, that it should be trying to connect to this computer - it does not get its name (or IP, or whatever what could identify it on the network). The Mac does not seem to advertise itself using Bonjour, so this must be direct connection from iPhone.

Yes.

The wifi disables itself on some carrier model iPhones when a phone call is received.

For some reason when the call is ended the iPhone doesn't reset it's wireless capabilities.

The iPhone wireless needs to be reset manually so it shows available to wi-fi connect to your other devices and sync to iTunes.

I've done it 20 times myself since Saturday.

The point being.

My SO has a 4gs running 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 wifi sync backup to iTunes works; her service is through AT&T 3G

My 5 running 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 on V 4g LTE network did not wifi sync with iTunes until I figured it was something to do with the wifi settings on the iPhone as all my other wifi devices worked and showed up as available. It wasn't until I discovered the wifi was also included under settings general cellular was I able to '(apparently) truly' reset the iPhone wifi availability; at which point the iphone showed up as available to sync with iTunes over wifi. It worked until I received a phone call then had to manually reset the hotspot and wifi again.

Made an err in the post above:

SO iphone 4gs only running 6.0.1...but still wifi iTunes sync is fine

I think I found some temporary solutions for those with similar configurations as mine:

So far, there are only two sure fire ways for me to get wifi syncing to work:

1. Uninstall and then reinstall iTunes.

or

2. Go into Services (Start...Run...services.msc) and restart the Apple Mobile Device and Bonjour services.

(this method is much easier.)

Neither method is permanent, but it'll do until they finally patch this mess.

Windows 7 64 bit

iOS 6.0.1 on iPad 3 and iPod 4th

iTunes 11.0.1.12

UPDATE:

I narrowed it down to simply restarting the Apple Mobile Device service. iTunes recognizes my devices (wirelessly) within 5 seconds of restarting it.

I also figured out to make make a shortcut:

Copy and past the following into Notepad (including quotations):

net stop "Apple Mobile Device"

net start "Apple Mobile Device"

Save the file as restart.bat

Opening this file will restart your Apple Mobile Device service. I pasted it into my Start menu for easy access. You could also throw it onto your taskbar. Again, this is just a temporary fix until Apple patches the problem.

@ dignan21 - I tried everything and that worked perfectly for me! Thanks!!

Strange, I have uninstalled some dynlibs (from Midnight Commander package) and now it seems to kind of work. When I start iTunes and wakeup iPhone to get Wifi signal - it appears as device and I can sync over wifi. Good enough for me to be satisfied. The screen in iPhone config still shows the same (as if it were not connected).

I read somewhere that the issue was to do with host names.

I have noticed that my mac hostsname is called Server-iMac but the host my iphone and iPad is trying to locate is Server iMac without the hyphen.

Could this be it?

In my case this could be one of the reasons why it now works. I have changed the hostname to be without hyphens and restarted Mac.

If you have this particular problem, here's an extended version of this script for Windows:

Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set oWshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
sBatch = oWshShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%temp%\temp.bat")
sComSpec = oWshShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%comspec%")
Set oBatch = oFSO.CreateTextFile(sBatch, True)
oBatch.WriteLine "@echo off"
oBatch.WriteLine "start ""iTunes"" ""C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe"""
oBatch.WriteLine "net stop ""Apple Mobile Device"""
oBatch.WriteLine "net start ""Apple Mobile Device"""  
oBatch.WriteLine "exit"
oBatch.Close
Set oShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
oShell.ShellExecute sComSpec, "/c """ & sBatch & """", , "runas", 0

Copy and paste the code into a new Notepad file. If you don't have an x64 system, you'll need to change C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe to C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe. Save it as runitunes.vbs or use another file name. The .vbs extension is the important part.

You need to be an administrator user to run it otherwise it won't let you restart the service. Double click the file and it should open iTunes and restart the Apple Mobile Device service thus showing your device in iTunes.