Q: Find my friends app not working

For me just following the instructions in the Find My Friends app's built-in help worked (as suggested at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4008). In particular, I didn't realize that the Find My Friends app has to be running on the target phone and can't have been force closed. (I wonder if that's the same with a reboot then.)

This seems to have changed from iOS 6. It's a stupid change.

Something just changed (0715 PST on 8 Mar 14). Just a few minutes ago I received a current and active notice that a friend left a particular location. I received the geofence crossing notice for a friend that has not triggered an event for months (or ever).  In fact I had forgotten that I had it set.

I don't know what has changed, but it must have been something on the Find My Friends server and not on either phone (both are iPhone 5 running IOS7). After not attempting to use geofences for a long time, I will now go back to setting a few and see what happens.

Perhaps what changed is the person restarted the Find My Friends app on their phone. Under iOS7.0.X at least, it appears to depend on the app running on the target device, as explained above and in the help file. Perhaps they will change this in 7.1.

I wish that was all it was.

With iOS 7.1, FMF response times seem to be better than with 7.0, and I am getting geofencing to routinely work with all of my friends who are also running 7.1 on iPhone 5 hardware.  So while I can't swear that it is 7.1 that gets the credit (because it might be just the forced restart that comes with the installation), FMF is working better today than at any time in the past year. Let's see how it works for the next 3 months.  I still have some testing to do to find out what the behavior is after a FMF forced quit (and with FMF not running after a restart).

I can confirm that Find my friends geofencing seems to work again. My friends with iPhone 4 / 4S / 5 all updated to iOS 7.1. and geofencing notifications now arrive every day.

The only problem is (and was before) that geofencing only works with good network coverage. If coverage is not good then locating is not accurate then the iPhone will slip through a geofence without sending a notification. But that's a obvious problem.