Share My Location Greyed Out - Restrictions off

Another solution: I had this same problem - Share My Location was grayed out. After doing the reset as suggested here it did fix the problem, but I lost all my settings which I did not want to restore manually. I then proceeded to do an iCloud restore to get my settings back at which time the issue reappeared. Upon further research I came across a similar thread different problem that suggested that a setting within the Restrictions settings was perhaps enabled. This made me wonder. Now, I have never even been under the Restrction setting, and when I navigated there (Settings>General>Restriction) it was toggled off, but as I scrolled down I came to a share my location tab which was showing a lock icon next to it. Solution: I toggled on Enable Restriction, scrolled down and unlocked share my location setting, then toggled off my enable restriction. Fixed problem. I have no idea how that ever got set to locked. Hope this works for others.

This worked. Changing the Share My Location setting (which had a padlock) under the Settings > General > Restrictions > Share My Location section as described by Mark. I could not change which iOS device was sharing my location. As I was trying to switch from iPhone to an iPad. The iPad would not allow me to change the device that was sharing my location; This choice was dimmed out and not selectable. I tried this in Find My Friends and in Settings under both Privacy > Location Services and under iCloud > Share My Location. All were dimmed. Follow the Helpful answer by Mark to fix this.

i am having the same issue

i cant do any of these my phone is stuck black and none of tthe buttons seem to work

what does reset all settings do? Sounds like this could be a pain...

I had the same issue on my kids iPhone 5. My wife and other kid could find her fine using Find My iPhone but on my iPhone and on the iCloud login on my MBA it would say "Online, not sharing location". I tried the suggestion posted here, I did a backup and/or restore (first one then the other and also both), I even started from scratch. Nothing helped. I ended up talking to Apple Engineering and they told me something got corrupt on the cloud server. They are working on it. Apparently you should not be able to turn the Find My Location or Share Location off on any Apple ID for kids under 13. If nothing else works for you try talking to Apple.

I hope that helps.

One Happy iUser.

MacMini, MBA, iPad Air and original, couple ATV, several iPhones and iPods.

I have the same issue with Find My iPhone on my wife's iPhone - when I'm logged into my iCloud account her phone shows as online but not sharing location, but if I log in to her account her location shows. So I don't think there's any issue with her Privacy or Location settings. (All of our other Apple products show up nicely too)

What's interesting is that she also has Find Friends on her iPhone, and I keep having to re-request her to allow me to follow her (no comments please!) - when she accepts the Find Friends request, all of a sudden her location becomes visible in Find My iPhone too. Then a few hours or days later, she becomes invisible on Find Friends and her location is hidden again in Find iPhone. So I don't know anything about the way the two programs are supposed to work together but it would seem that they are not playing nicely.

Any suggestions (other than calling Apple Engineering please)?

I was having the same problem today with my 10 year old's iPhone 5c.

On her phone, under iCloud, it turns out that I had overlooked 'Advanced' > 'Share my Location' which was set to off.

After turning on, it works perfectly.

That's not the problem with my wife's phone though - all the settings are correct or else it would never work properly.

I'm sorry to hear that Peter.

Luckily for us, it was a simple fix. I posted that to help others who, like me, overlooked the 'Advanced' section.

Good luck and let us know if it gets resolved.

I had the same issue and I didn't want to reset my settings. And I found another solution. There is another place where it needed to be enabled.

Here is the path:

Settings -> privacy -> location services -> system services. Enable share my location.

This fixed the issue for me. Hope it will help you as well.

One thing to note, it seems you can only share your location for a given account from one device. Find My iPhone can see where all your devices are but if you have 2 phones using the same Apple ID for iCloud and everything, the phone that is not the one being shared from currently will show where the sharing is being done from but Share My Location options will be grayed out and will not allow any changes. To make any changes, you have to stop Sharing My Location from the other device. There may be a way around this via Reset All Settings as others have found but in the default case when you still have access to both devices, just make the changes on the one currently sharing location and there will be no need to reset anything. BTW, this aspect of Sharing My Location is only relevant for Find My Friends and possibly sharing location via Messages, it does not effect Find My iPhone.

Thanks Mark! This is the correct solution! Not the silly chosen answer to reset all the settings!