iPhone 4 facetime not working

For me the deciding factor came down to the loss of SMS/Text messages. That my friends is more important to me than FT is (not that FT isn't a huge feature that I cannot use).

FWIW, I spoke to an Genious Tech at a local Apple Store this afternoon. They noted that it must be something corrupted in the software (not Apps, etc.) that simply reloads itself regardless of the iOS being used. They also noted there is no way to transfer Text/SMS messages so it is one or the other.

I did not ask the next crucial question. If the bug is in the restore and not necessarily the iOS or for that matter the hardware, would buying a newer phone actually solve the problem. If I get a new phone and simply restore my current backup (with all my stuff), will it now corrupt that phone's FT.

My wife and daughter have an iPhone 4S and son has a 5. But I don't have the heart to ruin their device ;-)

PineCrest......I am with you on hesitating to upgrade to the next phone. Yet my 4S is experiencing "old age" as I believe they are designed to do. I hesitate because right now, my FTime is working, not as brilliantly as it was, but working. With the 5 get hit harder in court and I've just put out hundreds of dollars for it, and the finger print software is not thrilling me with the new Government access to our records. It does seem unconsionable that they sell the phone heavily on the Facetime feature and yet are not acknowledging what is a worldwide problem. "Truth in advertising"?

and yet, they have us over a barrel so to speak, because our contacts have the iPhone so, what phone would we switch to? Rather insidious to be honest.

I'm at a loss as to what to do, as I said, because my 4S will need to be replaced soon. I am now wondering how many of my iMessages have been turned into and charges as SMS because of this issue.....so, not only are we not getting the service we paid for, we're being charged for services we should be getting free.

Ok. I did it. I restored to factory settings my iPhone 4 (32GB, launch week, USA, now on T-Mobile) from a fresh download of iOS 7. Facetime is back up and running and I must say seems to work better than ever. I made two calls, one to an iPhone 5 and one to my mom's Macbook Pro. No issues.

Prior to that, I backed up my photos to my Mac's desktop with Image Capture and emailed myself my Notes. I will transfer the photos back to my phone with Photo Transfer App via wifi and will copy/paste back my notes from Mail. I do not care for SMS as I don't live in the past (I, too, don't understand why people are so attached to them). Now I'm in the process of adding select apps. This is a great exercise as I realized that I barely ever used at least half of the apps that were on my phone. Now let's see if Facetime still works after that! I'll make sure to post here which apps I added if it stops working again.

This situation ***** on so many levels but it comes down to this: you want Facetime back? Do the factory settings restore.

Andrew,

Previously in this thread, I indicated that I restored my iPhone 4 as a new phone when using iOS 6.1.3. I did not use the backup and Facetime was restored.

After updating to iOS 7.0 FaceTime continues to function as advertised.

Ok I tried again

I 'm now with IOS7

I 've erased all the data and prefs of my iphone in the general settings.

Then i've putted again Icloud ON to recover my contacts and icloud mail

I switched my apple account ON

And Facetime is working again

Now I'm testing ,one more time, to restore with my backup

Backup restored and FT does not work anymore ..............

Thanks for confirming this... I've updated to IOS7, and FT is still broken.

Pathetic Apple! Did you get rid of all your good programmers? No-one there left to fix this anymore?

No surprise. I did this too. The issue is that there is something embedded in the backup (not related to Apps, etc) that cause FT to fail. It is truly amazing that they can't find a way to sort this out. Or at the very least, provide us with a tool to restore all elements (Notes, SMS, etc.) separately after a clean install.

As others have previously mentioned, I too upgraded my launch (July 2010) iPhone 4 32 GB AT&T (GSM) to iOS 7 and FaceTime still does not work. Just to be certain I erased my phone and restored from my iCloud backup (while in iOS 7) and FaceTime still wouldn't work.

I was thinking of testing a bit further, but I don't have high hopes. I was thinking of going into 'Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup > Manage Storage > Selecting 'This iPhone' backup > Delete Backup' to remove all backups. Then going back in and re-enabling iCloud Backup so it will take a fresh new backup of my data (now that iOS 7 is installed), then trying to restore from this new backup.

Alternatively, I was thinking of going into 'Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup > Manage Storage > Selecting 'This iPhone' backup > Delete Backup' to remove all backups. Then going back in and re-enabling iCloud Backup so it will take a fresh new backup of my data. After this I was considering going into Manage Storage and de-selecting (turning off) everything under the backup options. This way my camera roll and app data would not be backed up when it takes a fresh backup. After the new fresh backup is created with all backup options de-selected, I was thinking of restoring from this backup again and testing FaceTime. I was going to make sure I backed up my photos and videos to my computer first though.

From everything I've read on all of the posts though, I doubt either option I mentioned above will cause FaceTime to work.

This does make me wonder though on people who have erased all of their phones content and started from a "clean slate" if FaceTime is still working after some time or if the issue has arisen again. I also wonder if the ones who got FaceTime working by starting fresh, have a recent backup, and, if by chance they restore from that backup, if FaceTime would stop working again?

Gozen, Facetime is still working after starting from a clean slate yesterday. I've made or received about a dozen calls since then, from or to iPhones, iPads, Macs spread over USA and Canada. I am still slowly adding apps and testing. So far so good. And I must say it works really well! (iPhone 4 32GB, launch week, USA, now on T-Mobile)

So. The answer is if u want ft, clean slate. I'm guessing there's something in the way ft worked before the court case that means it doesn't work now. I can confirm if you do the factory reset add your apps and carry on using your phone it works fine. So it's really simple. If you want ft you just have to accept the loss of a few texts and get it sorted. Can't believe that some folk are moaning so much still. There is an answer. It's not great. But hey life ***** a little sometimes. Get on with it.

People are moaning because:

• New install and ditching the backup is a hacky workaround, not an acceptable solution.
• Apple won't acknowlege the problem.
• The problem's genesis is Apple - their back end change to Facetime created this issue for original iPhone 4 owners.
• Apple seemed more interested in deleting posts that mentioned iOS 7 in advance of the launch date than actually addressing/ackowledging the problem.
• We believe the scope of affected devices is likely to grow; the back end change to FaceTime was only for devices included in the VirnetX lawsuit - iPhone 4 (have seen this posted multiple times, but I'm not sure it's been proven). Once other devices are subject to the new back end it's likely a subset will experience the same problem and be forced to give up Facetime or forced to set up their phone as a new device and lose their backup.

I think a lot of people are as frustrated with the shortcomings of the workaround as they are with the way thousands of long time customers, with an Apple generated problem, are being ignored.

My wife and I got our iPhones at the same time. iPhone 4 32GB AT&T. 3 weeks ago Factime worked on both. Now it does not work on mine but hers still works. Mines was not working under iOS6 and it is still not working using iOS7 My wifes phone still has iOS6. iPad 2 has iOS7 and FT works on there. Could it be a hardware issue or did my phone just have a bad software issue. I will probably do the clean slate approach and not restore from Backup. I will let you all know.

My wife and I started having the exact same issues on our iPhone 4 phones about 3 weeks ago. No obvious explanation as to why...

For those still trying to troubleshoot, here is some interesting information that might help:

we have 5 FaceTime enabled devices in the home that were having issues since early Sept.:

• 2 x iPhone 4 (MC603C/A) iOS 7
• 1 x 13" MacBook late 2007 Mac OS X 10.7.5
• 1 x 13" Alum MacBook 2008 Mac OS X 10.8.5
• 1 x iPad 3 Retina iOS 7

the problem started on iOS 6 and carried over to iOS 7.

all 5 devices share a single Apple ID

• the Apple ID has 4 email addresses associated with it

after lots of messing around we were able to get the iPad and both MacBooks working with FaceTime 🙂 (the trick was to make sure all 3 had a different email address associated with the single Apple ID.)

no amount of turning accounts on or off could fix the iPhones 😟

• no tweaking of phone numbers or email addresses could get the iPhones to work 😟 (We tried using different email addresses for the phones too. No go.)

• Both iPhones were restored to factory settings late August. We switched from Rogers to Telus and got stung with the bill for unlocking phones. (Another story altogether... 😠) Both worked with FaceTime before and after that until just 3 weeks ago.
• We have been in contact with our ISP to make sure we are not having an issue there. ISP is not the issue. (I won't go into it, but we are using an AirPort Express Base Station. No settings were changed.)

Here's where it gets a bit strange...

• FaceTime on 10.7.5 works flawlessly. One email address displays in the preferences, no glitches. 🙂
• FaceTime on 10.8.5 will receive calls on the one email address associated as well as both phone numbers... 😕
• FaceTime on 10.8.5 will display all email addresses, but NO phone numbers. You can deselect email addresses you don't want associated with the device. However, there is no choice to deselect the phone numbers... 😕
• FaceTime on iPad works just fine. All email addresses AND phone numbers display in the settings and we are able to select only 1 address for it. It will not receive a call sent to our phone numbers. 🙂
• No amount of turning on or off FaceTime for 10.8.5 fixes the issue. 😟

What I am doing next...

• Calling Apple and telling them about my findings
• Attempt to delete all pref files for FaceTime on Mac OS X 10.8.5
• Restoring iPhones from factory settings 😟

I will repost my results.

Please respond if you have more to add that might help.

Regards,

Scrast

I'm very interested in what you discover as you add apps back to your phone. I am convinced that the FT disruption is due to a "rogue" app that was updated in late July/early August.