Unable to enable personal hotspot after iOS 9.0.1

Question

Level 1

1 points

Unable to enable personal hotspot after iOS 9.0.1

I usually use the continuity feature where I select my phone from my Mac's wifi to enable Personal Hotspot. Normally it turns on Personal Hotspot on the phone and the Mac automatically connects to it. After upgrading to iOS 9 (currently using 9.0.1), that feature doesn't work anymore. I get the error "Failed to enable Personal Hotspot on iPhone". I'm having problems with both my iMac and MacBook so I don't think it's the Macs that are having problems. The Macs are running 10.10.5.

Any suggestions?

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), null

Posted on Sep 27, 2015 7:08 PM

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Answer 1

ManSinha

Level 6

12,171 points

Sep 27, 2015 7:31 PM in response to paul7

That is interesting - I have never tried that before - usually when needed I just turn the Hotspot on on my iPhone and then use the Bluetooth feature in the status bar above to connect - I have iOS 9.0.1 - just tried your method and it worked fine.

Can you try to

1. Reboot the phone holding down the off/on and home buttons until you see an Apple logo? No data loss

2. If that does not work, reset the network settings on your phone and try again? (it will erase stored WiFi passwords)

(1061)

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Answer 2

Sep 28, 2015 5:53 AM in response to paul7

I use this same feature constantly with my iPad Air. I can still tether the iPad by going into the iPhone's hotspot screen and making it discoverable, but tethering with no interaction with the iPhone is an enormous benefit I'd like to get back.

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Answer 3

paul7 Author

Level 1

1 points

Sep 28, 2015 6:34 AM in response to ManSinha

Yup, I've tried the basics, including reboots, reseting the Network settings. It didn't fix the problem.

Technically, you shouldn't even have to turn on the hotspot feature on the iPhone manually. Apple is advertising that with continuity, you should be able to just select your iPhone under the Personal Hotspot section from the Wifi drop down menu, and it should automatically turn on the Hot Spot feature on your phone and connect to it.

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Answer 4

xenopain

Level 1

4 points

Sep 29, 2015 7:38 AM in response to paul7

I had the same issue where I could not enable Personal Hotspot anymore with a new iphone 6s.

I called Apple support, and they suggested backing up and restoring the iphone. I backed up locally (instead of using iCloud) and restored from there, it is pretty quick and it solved the issue. Make sure you re-download iTunes 12.3 as there are reports that the original build was corrupted and had part in personal hotspot breaking in Macs (and may apply to Windows as well).And I would just suggest backing up and restoring from local copy - faster and easier. Restoring from iCloud takes way too long.

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Answer 5

Sep 29, 2015 9:46 PM in response to paul7

Resetting network settings did not work for me but noticed the phone had changed its name (Settings->General->About). Putting the name back to what it was originally fixed the issue for me.

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Answer 6

paul7 Author

Level 1

1 points

Oct 17, 2015 11:48 AM in response to paul7

Thanks for all your responses!

Strangely enough, I would be able to connect if I manually turned on Personal Hotspot on the iPhone and then turned OFF bluetooth on my Macbook. Then, I can select the iPhone from the wifi drop down menu and it'll connect. It sounds like there is a problem with the bluetooth handoff.

I have also since upgraded to an iPhone 6s and iOS 9.0.2 and updated the computers to 10.11 and the problem has gone away (though I still had the problem with 10.11 and iPhone 6 running iOS 9.0.1), so I'm not sure if it's b/c of the new phone, or if it is because of the 9.0.2 update.

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Answer 7

Oct 3, 2015 5:29 AM in response to paul7

I updated to 9.0.2 last night and tested the tether from my iPad, and it worked just as it did prior to 9.0.1.

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Answer 8

jeeva86

Level 1

0 points

Oct 6, 2015 9:34 PM in response to paul7

This worked for me. I could connect once I disabled bluetooth on the mac and iphone. Not sure which of the two fixed it.

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Answer 9

Wayne S.

Level 1

10 points

Oct 17, 2015 11:47 AM in response to paul7

Turning off bluetooth on the iPhone fixed the issue for me. With bluetooth enabled I could not connect to the iPhone hotspot. After turning it off and having the personal hotspot turned on already, I was able to connect.

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