handoff works one way, not the other

As of today, I'm having the opposite effect but similar to others on the thread. Handoff works great from my Air to my iPad Mini, but not from the iPad to the MBA (ok, it worked once for a Safari browse, but not for any other app nor a second time with Safari). I'll try the restart approach (hey, rebooting fixes everything right?), but I agree that I think Apple probably needs a little robustness work here. Fabulous feature but it clearly requires the correct sequence of events, magical incantations, and planetary alignments to work right now. I'm adding this post just to add some weight to the thread in hopes that a little more weight will prod Apple to put some effort into beefing this up a bit to make it industrial strength.

Same problems. But, I am using a mdi-2009 Mac Pro with osxwifi dot com hardware upgrade to allow Continuity and Handoff and iPhone 5 running iOS 9.0.1. Handoff from Mac Pro to iPhone worked fine. But not from iPhone to Mac Pro.

I logged out of iCloud on Mac Pro. Logged back in. Still no love. But, I wouldn't skip that step. Do it anyway just to replicate this solution.

Then turn on "Private" mode browsing in Safari on iPhone. Then turn it off again.

Voila! Full Continuity and Handoff on both devices.

I googled my problem and found this thread... it's very similar.

I have a 2011 iMac, a late 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, an iPad mini 3, and iPhone 5c. Every device is running the most recent OS update. My iMac does not support handoff but it does support text and call forwarding... it's one year too old for handoff. But my MacBook Pro and all my iOS devices do support handoff.

Almost ALWAYS handoff works perfectly going from Mac to iOS, but the other way around was not always working. So I started playing with a few different scenarios and that's when I noticed it.... the screen of my iOS device has to be on and the app I want to handoff has to be the foreground app. Like, if I have a text message open on my phone, the handoff icon appears on my MBP, but the second I turn off my iPhone screen (I even keep the app open) the handoff icon disappears from my dock. Turn the screen back on and unlock the iPhone, and bam, it's back.

Now, I don't know if this is the way this feature is supposed to work or not. I also haven't found any obvious way to mess with the settings for handoff, but I really haven't looked very hard... or at all. However, and this may just be me, but wouldn't it make more sense to allow handoff from an iOS device with the screen off? I mean, if I'm in my car and I get an email, and I open that email and start reading it while I'm walking from my car into my office, before I sit down at my desk my natural instinct is going to be to turn my iPhone's screen off and put it in my pocket. Then I open my MacBook Pro and log in... wouldn't it be nice for the handoff from that email to be sitting there in my dock waiting for me? It doesn't make sense that I should have to pull my iPhone back out of my pocket and unlock it just to invoke that handoff icon. In my opinion it defeats the entire purpose of handoff because I'm back to using two devices at the same time, only to invoke the handoff dock icon. The process of pulling my phone out of my pocket and unlocking it does not take any less time than opening the Mail or Messages app directly from the Mac and finding the message I was looking at, especially with how my phone gets stuck in my pocket sometimes.

I don't know if its common knowledge or not that you need to have your iOS device screen turned on and the app in question in the foreground in order to handoff from iOS to Mac, but in reading through this thread I didn't see it mentioned. So maybe I helped someone realize more about how the feature works... maybe I didn't.

I had this issue too; while my iPhone 6 would display the app being used on my MPB retina 13", the extra safari/maps/mail on the left hand side of the dock would not appear (iOS and OS X are up-to-date, it may be worth noting). After a bit of experimentation, I found a solution by creating a new user account on my Mac, signing in to iCloud and trying the Handoff on this new account. Hey presto, it worked both ways, so I signed out and tried Handoff on my main user account and thank goodness that worked too. (One can obviously delete this trial user account).

Such issues with connecting between Apple devices are annoying and increasingly common -- especially, I find, with features that require Bluetooth (e.g. Airdrop).