wifi sync not working after ios6 update

How is stopping and starting a service any different to re-booting your pc which stops and then re-starts all services !?

It's still not working for me after trying all these options.

I still think it has something to do with itunes as it stopped working for me after ALWAYS workign faultlessly after I updated itunes and BEFORE the OS6 update !!??

I updated today to 6.0.1 and the wifi sync started to work 🙂🙂🙂... iguess this has been fixed in the new update

So did I and it hasn't changed a thing !

Folks, I was having the exact same problems. I tried everything mentioned here, including a complete restore of my iOS devices, but nothing would work permanently. It would work for a few minutes or hours, but then the problems re-surfaced. I'm not sure that the root of our problems is the same for each of us, but I permanently solved my problem. To check if your problem is the same as mine, (on a Mac) open up the terminal and type:

scutil --get HostName

If it comes back with "Hostname: not set" then very possibly you have the same problem as I did. It's important to note that HostName is different from ComputerName, LocalHostName, and DHCP Client ID, so don't assume you've got a host name set because your router shows it, or system preferences shows it.

When you plug it in, the iOS device searches for a Mac with the host name (in my case) Fabio-Papas-iMac on the network. If the hostname isn't set, then it doesn't find the Mac, and can't sync to it. To fix that, go back to terminal and type:

scutil --set Hostname "Fabio-Papas-iMac"

or whatever the equivalent is for you. You can find out what host name your iOS device is looking for by going to Settings-> General -> iTunes Wi-Fi Sync. It tells you there. Once you've done this, you must reboot. Then go into iTunes and watch your devices automagically sync. If they don't, plug them in and make sure that wi-fi sync is enabled.

Here's what I'm thinking caused the problem. The wi-fi syncing communication is all done IP to IP and NOT via host name. But since IP addresses can change, wi-fi sync uses the hostname to find out what your Mac's IP address is. The iOS device then stores this IP address and uses it for syncing for a while, until an internal timeout tells it to find the Mac by host name again to make sure it still has the correct IP. If the host name isn't set, the sync doesn't work. We would plug the iPhone back into the computer (or do a restore, etc.), which would once again store the IP address in the iOS device, which would make wi-fi sync work again, and after the timeout period, the problem would just happen again. I think that in iOS 5.x, this timeout period was much longer. Maybe weeks. In iOS 5, once in a while I would notice that this problem would start, but just simply re-syncing via cable would fix the problem; at least for a long while. With iOS 6, i think they shortened this period to a few hours. I'm not sure why some of us do not have a host name set. I'm a web developer and use my Mac to run and test web apps. It could be that I (or a program I use) cleared out my host name by accident.

Hope this works for all of you, and happy syncing!

Wow, this is very promising. It makes perfect sense, since the issue was always the IOS device showing "searching for so and so's iMac" I checked and HostName was indeed not set, so I've now set it and rebooted and it seems like things are working. For some reason, my iPad would disappear from iTunes when I unplugged it from the computer, but restarting wifi seems to have corrected that and I have been able to sync all devices through wifi and they sync automatically when plugged into power as they should.

It is odd because there are other apps (Mobile Mouse, ssh client ftp and others) that are always able to find my iMac through the device name even when the ip changes, so its odd that only Apple's own devices need this, but oh well...

Time will tell now, but thanks for this!

Sounded promising but unfortunately didn't work. 😟

Anyone able to translate into PC how to do this?

Have found that if you've updated to IOS 6.0.1 - connect iPhone to power supply, open iTunes and then switch of iPhone and restart and then it appears in iTunes.

After installing iOS 6.0.1, iTunes on my mac could no longer see my iPhone 5. It worked perfectly before that. Just typing scutil --get HostName fixed the issue.

Restarting the AppleMobileDeviceHelper process by force quitting it in Mac OSX's Activity Monitor and relaunching iTunes fixed the sync issue for me.

Did it fix it permanently? I've found using the iPhone AirPort Utility and restarting the base station (time capsule) that it'd then once restarted allow iTunes to show my iPhone immediately, but if I have to reboot, it's gone again.

Renaming as instructed above didn't work either.

I tried fapapa's approach and it worked (so far). There is a typo in the --set command. HostName... need to capitalize the "N".

Worked great thanks !!

Awesome. Thanks. All I needed was to turn on UPnP pn my router and restart iTunes, and it worked!

Apple should mention this in its troubleshooting checklist.

For Mac users with Iphone 4GS: This worked for me after the same issues:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1747

Thank you Rackmani for the link and Iphone32gb for coming up with this solution!!