Bluetooth settings on iPhone crashes settings

Here with the good and the ugly.

I have solved this issue. But it was not how I wanted it to be.

1 went to Apple Store had them run diagnostics against my phone. It checked out fine except a hit for software error which they said they could not troubleshoot.

I finally got fed up and left.

2. I went home and connected my phone iTunes and did an encrypted backup.

3. I validated all my contacts were still in my gmail and also my personal calendar.

4. I also had a valid backup up on iCloud from the night before.

5. I upgraded my iOS to 10.2.2 which just came out.

6. I used the restore phone settings in iTunes.

7. When it came back up I selected set up as new phone.

8. After I went thru the initial menus of a new phone setup Bluetooth quit crashing

9. I paired my watch

10. I retested Bluetooth and it continued to work.

11. I restored just my contacts and pictures from iCloud of which I had 4 contacts and about 90 photos

12. I configured my gmail account under mail and pulled all my other contacts down

13. I retested Bluetooth still working

14. I went to iTunes and picked all my apps to put back on my phone

15. Picked all my music / media and brought it down to my phone

16. Spent the next three hours updating apps reconfiguring settings getting my vpn tokens working again and other misc crap.

At the end of the day I have everything working and no more Bluetooth crashing

It seems that the error is contained in our backups and doing a restore of all your data brings the issue back.

If you want it fixed you have to do the work.

In hindsight using airplane mode and the enabling Bluetooth took me about 30 seconds. And let's be real how often do you have to add new devices??

Mine is fixed but it was a lot of work to get back to a full working state.

The one thing that bummed me out was I lost all my text message voice mail call history etc.

Of course they are in a backup file and in theory I could restore that back and have it all but Bluetooth would be broke again. Since a majority of the people I text are on iMessage I still have most of it on my iPad .

I am just sitting here thinking I could have hooked up hundreds of Bluetooth connections over the next several years and still gained back 8 hours of my life.

I did notice there are some software vendors that can crawl thru your iCloud or local backups to get your messages vms and call history back but I opted out of this as an acceptable loss.

Good luck whatever you do. But apple needs to file a bug on this issue. You should not have to dump your life for a small error like this.

I digress

This is the same issue I have. I have done everything from resetting and restoring. The issue goes away, until you re-pair iwatch then it starts doing this again.

If I remove iwatch pairing from iphone and restart it works great. When I add my watch back it opens and closes.

Only way I get around it is to turn on airplane mode, then go to the bluetooth settings and it works then take airplane mode off after I do whatever I need to in bluetooth.

I just updated watch this morning to 2.2.2 or whatever it was and it is still broken.

iPhone 7 - exact same issue here. When I tap "Bluetooth" in the Settings app, the Settings app immediately crashes. The only workaround is turning on airplane mode, then entering bluetooth and turning it back on, then doing whatever I have to do in bluetooth settings, and then turning airplane mode back off. That's it. Very frustrating. I've already reset network settings, all settings, full restore, etc. Nothing works.

Same thing here except it is happening to me using ios 10.0.2 and watchOS3 on an iPhone 7 Plus. Even after removing the iwatch and resetting the network settings, it still crashes unless I turn bluetooth off first.

So I think I found the issue, at least in my case: Phantom Devices

A much less painful test and (possible) solution:

1. Forget all your devices
2. Come out of bluetooth settings
3. Go into bluetooth settings

   Miraculously, 2 old 'phantom' devices (heart rate monitors) showed up that I have long since stopped using or lost

4. Notice now you can come and go as you please without any crashes
5. Forget all miracle devices
6. Notice now you can still come and go as you please without any crashes
7. Pair your devices as and when you need them

@okiergrit, my condolences for your mother passing. As for you lengthy re-initialisation pains, if you have the stomach for it, maybe restore from a backup and try this out? No doubt by now you would have new (recent) phone history that you would lose if you do

Remove "phantom devices" without removing actual "in use" devices.

A) Shutt device off

B) re start in safe mode *

C) when re started, open iOS settings

D) select Bluetooth (would crash)

E) in settings select Bluetooth off

F) in home , if iPhone 7, press settings icon for submenu to be shown

G) select Bluetooth , devices would be shown in numbers codes , wait to this change to actual devices names

H) phantom devices should appear at the top

I) delete all phantoms

J) reboot phone

*safe mode:

1) Turn off your iPhone.

2) Turn on your iPhone.

3) As soon as you see the Apple logo, press and hold the Volume Up button. Keep holding until you see your iPhone Lock screen. This will force your iPhone to start in Safe Mode where all jailbreak extensions are disabled.

4) Follow the instructions above to remove paired Bluetooth devices.

5) Reboot your iPhone.

I have the same issue, which was not solved by any of the steps you describe above. It would be great if you could let us know what to do. Thanks and best regards, Peter

iPhone 6 (MG4A2ZD/A), IOs 10.0.1 (14A403)

I have this same issue. No iwatch involved. If I turn off Bluetooth through the console, I can open Bluetooth under settings. If Bluetooth is on and I try to open it in settings, it immediately crashes.

iPhone 6s, ios 10.2 pb 2.

Really appreciate this great answer, even though it's not what most of us wanted to hear. I had a friend tell me he always sets-up a new iPhone as a new phone rather than with the profile of the older phone that is being replaced, just for this reason. I thought that was crazy. Maybe he was right.

Thank you for the detailed post

I agree, apple should fix this and we should not "dump" our lives trying to work this out.... it's a simple bug that needs to be fixed asap especially that apple is going down the wireless route, which means we need to access the blue tooth settings more than ever befor ..... but we can't as it constantly crashes

Am very disappointed with apple because of this , the wasted time backing up, restoring, resetting settings ... etc and the frustrations it has caused !!

Great job! Thanks for sharing with us. Yeah, that was a lot of work and I think I am not going to follow that. I will just turn off the bluetooth from the control center and get to settings that way. I hope Apple will fix the issue in the upcoming updates.

Did you solve this problem? Did you follow Apple Support's recommendation? I hate to have to reconfigure all the network settings.

I also used an extra iphone I had from my mother passed away, and it is the same behavior, this started after the last iphone update a few months back the previous versions did not have this issue.

Test

DarrenBishop

So I think I found the issue, at least in my case: Phantom Devices

A much less painful test and (possible) solution:

1. Forget all your devices
2. Come out of bluetooth settings
3. Go into bluetooth settings

   Miraculously, 2 old 'phantom' devices (heart rate monitors) showed up that I have long since stopped using or lost

4. Notice now you can come and go as you please without any crashes
5. Forget all miracle devices
6. Notice now you can still come and go as you please without any crashes
7. Pair your devices as and when you need them

------------------

DarrenBishop:

A few points:

1) This solution looks silly. Why would you possibly think this would work? But wait...

2) I tried it AND IT WORKS!!!!!! And it wasn't too painful at all to reinstall a few Bluetooth items

3) THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!

4) How on earth did you find that solution?