Find My Friends drops friend

Try switching on family sharing and adding your family members, this worked for me. I started having problems once I switched it off, then I tried everything to no avail, but once switched back on again FMF worked fine.

There is a setting in privacy/location services/find friends. Are both of you set to when using the app? Do either of you turn off phone overnight? Just thinking maybe this option is reset to never when turning on phone for one of you. I don’t know the answer to your problem but this might be worth checking..

If you need more proof this is wider spread, I am having the problem also. No a familiy member, but an outside friend. So turning on or off Familiy Sharing is not it.

One other data point I could offer, is that my friend and I could mantain connections previously. Seems it may have started when he switched phone numbers. Although I use his email address to connect with. My wife’s phone however, tracks the same friend and it doesn’t drop.

If this indeed has been happening to others for years, then I guess it’s not an IOS 11 issue either.

Find Friends can only track a phone by its number from a phone using its number. So if the phone number changes of either the tracker or the trackee Find Friends can no longer track. If you think about it this is an important security feature. If this was not true anyone who hacked your Apple Id count track everyone that you were able to track.

I am seeing the same thing happen with my wife and daughters. To the best of my knowledge none have made any changes in their profile and none have an apple watch, so I don't think the watch has anything to do with it. I think it may have something to do with login in and out of ocloud though. The reason I say that is I had one daughter drop off and she got logged out of her icloud and forgot her password. We then changed her password and I couldn't get her location to register again without deleting her as a friend and then re-inviting her.

FMF used to be incredibly reliable, but I would say in the last 6 or so months it has been a big maintenance issue to try and keep it running, so if I don't find an answer soon, I am going to look for a third party equivalent.

This can happen if friend changes cellular provider but retains the same number. He could see me but could not find him. In this case just set up again.

I was so hoping for an answer here for this problem. We have 6 iPhones with their own Apple ids setup with cox. Only one of them keeps removing themselves from sharing their shared location. So after a day or so everyone has to resubmit the "ask to follow" to the one account.

It's very aggravating and it'd be nice to know why and how to fix it. Hard to understand why the other five work fine with find friends and one does not.

Of course this is true. But we’ve of course re-connected via his email address which is linked to his iCloud account. And if it didn’t work, he would not be able to see me. And it works for an hour, a day or two, but then drops the one way follow ability. He can still me, my wife can still see him,. but after some time, I’m disallowed.

Yes, we have been setting it up, every day we do it again and again.

Shayfromny wrote:

Am experiencing the same problem two years after the initial complaint. So frustrating that no answer has come up!

Another way to look at it: It was a problem for 2 people 2 years ago, and 1 within the past 18 months and 1 10 months ago. Out of 1 billion users. So most likely it is a problem specifically for you, not a general problem with Find Friends or you would see a lot more posts about it. You need to troubleshoot it within those parameters. You might try making a genius bar appointment at your nearest Apple store for guidance.

If you also describe your situation specifically (I assume it is not exactly the same as any of the previous posters) one of the users in this user-to-user forum might have an idea.

K

I'm having this same exact issue. My wife uses a yahoo.com email address as her apple id. Could that be a factor here? She also has a couple unused apple id aliases.

Am experiencing the same problem two years after the initial complaint. So frustrating that no answer has come up!