iPhone 4 facetime not working

You can add another iPhone 4 to the list.

I bought this one in September 2010 and have recently been having the same issue as everyone else here with facetime not working. Upgrading to ios7 did not solve the problem.

My wife got her iPhone 4 about 6 months ago when the telecom company was trying to liquidate their stock. Her phone has no facetime issues.

Having to do a factory reset and manual restore is not what I had in mind when buying a "hassle free" apple product. This, among many other similar annoyances related to Apple's phasing-out tactics, is making me take a good hard look at alternative devices these days.

I wish that our complaints didn't fall on deaf ears.

mac.geek,

I'm at my wit's end and want to attempt a "restore to factory settings" on my iPhone 4 to get FT working again. I'm currently running iTunes 10.6.3 under Mac OS X 10.5.8 -- should I be able to complete this restore successfully?

If the restore updates my iPhone from iOS 6.1.3 to iOS 7, I'll be unable to sync via iTunes -- is this necessary t complete the restore? If my computer fails to recognize the iPhone after the restore, I'm afraid that it will be left in limbo.

I'd appreciate any advice from someone who has successfully accomplished a "restore to factory settings" -- I do not want to be left with a lifeless "brick" if this fails.

As far as I can find you need iTunes 11 with iOS7. Also I think it will only work on an Intel Mac. If you have an Intel Mac you should be able to upgrade your OS and iTunes.

I spent a good deal of time with apple help chat. I thought I would paste in the instructions they sent me. Hope it saves other people some time.

FaceTime stopped working on my iPhone 4 earlier this summer. I followed their instructions and it's now working just fine. I'm now even running iOS 7. I'm quite pleased with my phone again.

In my case, I found that I could not "restore from backup" See steps 6 and 7. It broke faceTime again. And I had to go back and repeat step 5, and then manually sync my content back on my phone. It seems like a pain, but with iCloud and taking some screen grabs of iTunes to remember which music albums etc. were synced, it wasn't too bad. Honestly the most hassle was simply rearranging my icons on my home screens. Again screen grabs helped there too.

Proceed at your own risk, but here are the instructions I received from Apple tech support:

That's good news. Thanks for your effort in sharing.

Would you please tell me if you also manually synched all of your previously held apps that you had on your iPhone when FaceTime was not working or have you missed some apps out from your manual synching/restore?

I spent some more time today on Apple. First I ordered the Snow Leopard software so that I could update my MacBook Pro running 10.5.8 (about $22).

Next I spent time with apparently a senior iPhone tech support representative who was both very patient and willing to help. He, like so many others, genuinely seemed unaware of our issue which obviously is the greatest cause for real concern since one would think this would be drifting up the Apple ladder at least a little.

One thing he had me do was a "Reset All Settings" which is under Setup>General>Reset (at the bottom of General). This reset does not wipe the phone but does clear out IDs, Wifi access codes, your home screen picture setting, dimming setting, etc. It does not touch apps or other data.

This did not solve my FT issue. But at least with respect to someone on the same wifi network, in this case an iPad, the "connecting..." process takes about 2-3 minutes after the call is accepted before it fails (Connection Failed is the phrase that appears on iOS7 now). With iPhone users on different networks, the Connection Failed message came up as soon as they accepted the call.

The big difference here is that it almost looks like the phone is trying to connect through something but then gives up. Obviously this is conjecture but perhaps this may work for others.

One last thing the tech and I discussed. I have had an Apple ID long before it had to be an email address. Funny thing is that in order to log onto this community, I have to use my old ID and password and not my email address and different password. If I want to manage my Apple ID Account, I can sign in with my email and FWIW, I can also sign in with both on FT on my phone.

Both the Tech and I wondered if this issue of having two Apple IDs both linked to the same account is a common issue among those of us having this problem. My first Apple ID was simply a name without "@xyz.com". I don't remember when I started using it but it is most definitely tied to my email ID.

I made the decision and finally took the plunge yesterday and erased my iPhone 4 and set it up as a new device. As expected, FaceTime is working again now. I setup my phone pretty much exactly as I had before. Downloaded all of the Apps I had previously and added my mail accounts. Even after doing all of this FaceTime still works. I did lose all of my 'Messages' (SMS, MMS, iMessage), Notes, Voice Memos, Alarms, Settings, etc. But I was prepared for all of that. I did copy my photos and videos over to my computer before erasing and starting new. I didn't bother transferring them back over.

I did not sync all apps, but it was by choice not by accident. I took the opportunity to clean house on apps I never use any more. I have yet to discover an app that was forgotten by mistake.

Then again, I could always resync a forgotten app. The more important thing was making sure the data from the apps was backup up in a way that could be resynced manually. (Saving photos etc.) The potential to miss something was high. I have yet to discover any data that was lost. However, some data was lost (iMessage History), but I was aware it was going to be lost before I proceeded. So I was ok with that.

Gozen,

I assume that you did this via iTunes 11, am I correct.

I have not yet erased my iPhone 4 yet because I cannot run iTunes 11 on my Apple computer, and I am concerned that I will be unable to complete the re- activation if iOS 7 is installed by this process.

Are you now using iOS 7 on your iPhone?

Regards,

Bill

Hi Bill,

I actually did pretty much everything without the use of iTunes.

Last Wednesday, I upgraded to iOS 7 directly from my phone itself and had no issues with the exception of FaceTime. Yesterday, I erased the entire contents of my iPhone from the phone itself and then set it up as a new phone. I rarely use iTunes these days since the release of iOS 5 and iCloud. I did however, still plug my phone into my computer to copy my photos and videos from the phone. I noticed that my phone wasn't being detected at first due to it running iOS 7. I then upgraded to iTunes 11.x, rebooted, and my phone was successfully detected. I had assumed they released a new iPhone driver to coincide with the release of iOS 7. My computer is older and running Windows XP.

Hopefully this information helps a little.

'Fix' the bug means to correct the flaw in the software so that it is completed eliminated: i.e., KILLED.

'Remove' the bug means to uninstall the software that has the flaw: i.e. 'REMOVED'.

It's the difference between killing the rat in your basement and trapping & releasing the rat back to the wild. The rat still exists, and can come back later.

It's not semantincs. It's you not understanding the point. Hopefully, that has been corrected.

Thanks, Gozen!

If I understand correctly, your iPhone was able to reset as a new device and was operational before you attempted to re-connect to iTunes.

That makes me feel better about attempting the erasure.

I probably should be thinking about upgrading my computer.

Thanks again!

Interesting ... I tried again to initiate a FT call to my wife's iPhone 4 (on which FT is working) and this time I receiving the "...connecting" message for several seconds before receiving a "FaceTime unavailable" message.

Last evening, I was seeing "...connecting" almost immediately followed by "...connection failed"

Anyone who is still having this problem notice a change?

Nothing different here. Except, a couple things. I have not done a restore from backup in months yet, I am having the same issue with facetimeand I was not having trouble till Sunday. So, is it trully related to backup? Also, I have not added a new app in months as well. It seems that it is most likely related to the change in connections and the restore just happens to reset everything where it is not looking for the old connection. I am not super tech savvy so forgive me if this sounds ridiculous or has already been addressed and dismissed. My daughter whom I FT with mainly has not updated ever nor able to install the new OS. The issue on her end for that seems to be (for both I imagine) is not enough space available. This could be a connection or none at all. I like all of you am frustrated and wonder why Apple has not addressed this issue nor seem too eager to do so. As, one post stated they make billions I can't imagine that a fix/repair could be that costly if at all. Seems with all the competition they are facing they would want it fixed. One of the main reasons I have this is for the facetime. If I can't use that then there is no reason to continue with the IPhone.

Apple is most likely being advised by their legal team not to admit to a problem or even allow their customer service reps to acknowledge the problem is a popular one. Currently Apple is waiting on the judge in the patent infringement lawsuit to set an ongoing royalty rate for the infringing products. Any sort of chink in the armor in regards to the relay server "work around" makes the patents more valuable on an on-going basis. I'd have to guess that the 500,000+ complaint calls caught the judge's attention and if VirnetX could submit an even more overwhelming number as an addendum, it would not be favorable for Apple.

Maybe we should inform the customer service reps of Tim Cook's tweet, "Visited retail store in Palo Alto today. Seeing so many happy customers reminds us of why we do what we do" 3:02 EDT 9/23/13. Heck maybe we should remind Tim Cook.