Flaky iPhone 5 wifi sync with itunes

yup, the sync is very flaky. another ios feature!

I will add to this discussion. Same problem. Went from 3GS to 5. Sync'd using the 3gs name which was replaced by the 5. 3GS now off the system. Get a warning message that iTunes does not regonize the phone half way through the sync. The first sync had no issues, ever since then....blah.

Just going to throw my two cents in because this fixed my problem of my iPhone not showing up in my iTunes list as an available device even though I did have "sync with this iPhone over wifi" checked. I have port forwding set up in my router and I have come to realize that port forwarding doesn't play well with uPnP. All I did was disable uPnP in my router then all four of my devices magically appeared back in the devices list in iTunes.

My iPhone 5 is intermittent, at showing up, when I open iTunes as well. It seemed fine at first, but once it was all setup it seemed to be absent most of the time, while my other 3 regular devices showed up faithfully (iPad, iPad 2, and iPhone 3GS).

I noticed that I could initiate sync from my iPhone 5 in "Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync > Sync Now) and that would bring it up in iTunes and Sync it. That's what I've been doing, when it doesn't show up in iTunes, which seems to be most of the time. Kind of a pain, but until I find a permanent fix it works for me.

This did not work. I can get the phone to be recoginized by hard wiring it to iTunes, it see's the phone and says its sync'ing but it's not. Yes I do see the sync on both sides and yes I do have the option selected for WiFi in iTunes. Even when iTunes is up on the phone will not sync Wifi (it's grayed out). The hard ire sync does not do anything. Very frustrating

It almost sounds like your computer is confused as to what phone it is syncing with. You said you used the 3GS name for the iPhone 5. When I setup my new iPhone 5 I used a new unique name and left my 3GS Phone as is. They both work for syncing, but the iPhone 5 doesn't always show up when opening iTunes. That's where initiating syc from my iPhone 5 comes in. When I initiate sync from iPhone 5 it immediately shows up in iTunes and syncs. This, of course, is all over Wi-Fi.

Sorry I couldn't be more help!

Oh that's exactly what's going on, but thw whole idea of iTunes is to upgrade exactly that way...too bad its only theory 🙂

Windows user here. What finally fixed this for me was to go to "Firewall - > Allowed Apps" and make sure that the "Bonjour Service" is allowed in both network types

I am having a problem syncing iphone 5 to iTunes. An 'internal device error' occurs. After trying again, I got this:

"an unknown error occurred (-50)".

Running 6.0.1 also.