Setting up Apple ID taking too long?

Hello Kaci,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

I see you are having difficulties setting up the iPhone. I would recommend starting by using iTunes to restore the iPhone as new, Use iTunes on your Mac or PC to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings

You can always set up your iPhone without an Apple ID. Then create an Apple ID, Create and start using an Apple ID

Once you have the Apple ID, you can sign in to that Apple ID on the phone, Sign in with a different Apple ID on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Best regards.

I'm having the same trouble. I'm just doing it through iTunes instead, but if it's not possible to sign in with an Apple ID from the phone itself, they should just remove that as an option, it's frustrating and I've wasted a bunch of time trying to figure it out, when ultimately it looks like that just won't work.

It is possible to sign in with an Apple ID on the phone. If you describe exactly what you are doing and what the result is someone may be able to help you.

Half the time it just hangs, I have to do a hard-reboot when that happens. Other times it just gives an error that it's unable to authenticate. My wifi is definitely working (I'm using it to type this message). I have 2-factor authentication enabled, maybe that's the cause of the problem? I'm setting up iPhone from factory-reset. I'm now doing the process though iTunes, so hopefully that'll just work, but it would be interesting to now what was causing the trouble...

Ugh, that didn't seem to help at all (trying to do it through iTunes), my iPhone is still prompting me for my Apple ID & Password, and still hanging....it doesn't seem like it should be this hard.

I just did a hard-reboot. This time it said "Verification Failed - There was an error connecting to the Apple ID server."

I wasn't expecting this to be such an ordeal, if I had known I'd be without a working phone for so long, I'd have waited until late at night to do this, when I wouldn't expect any calls or texts.

I'm not sure what to do at this point...and I can't call tech support, because this is my only phone.

That error means that something on your computer is blocking access to gs.apple.com. It may be your antivirus or firewall, or the firewall in your router. It can also result if your phone has ever been jailbroken, or if your computer has been used to jailbreak some iOS device in the past.

I connect directly to my Airport Extreme, apparently that was the problem, though I have no idea why. I tried using a neighbor's unprotected WIFI (which I hate to do, but I need my phone up & running). I made it a lot further, but now it's hanging on Adding Card for apple pay 😕

I think I'm gonna have to hard-reboot again. Is there no way to just use my AT&T account to connect, rather than a random neighbor's wifi?

Yes, if your AT&T account is provisioned for an iPhone and you have an iPhone SIM in it you can use cellular data. In fact, that is the default for setup.

I *might* have figured out the problem. Boy, that was no fun!! I just finished stumbling through the process, using a neighbor's wifi, seems like I've got it working now. I was looking at my Airport Extreme's settings, to see if anything was configured wrong there. There was one issue, which was the firmware was out of date, so I updated that. It reported no further issues. Then, I decided to change DNS servers to one that doesn't keep logs...only then did it give me an error that my Apple ID's password (within the Airport Extreme) was incorrect, which is right, I had changed my password several weeks ago. Too late to tell for sure now, but maybe that's why it wasn't working, but it never told me that was the issue, I just happened to discover that by random chance (changing the DNS server).

I turned off my wifi and used my 3G and that solved the problem