Whenever I go into Settings-->Bluetooth on my iPhone, the settings app crashes immediately. If I turn bluetooth off through control center, then I can open the Bluetooth settings, for example, to pair an additional device. But if Bluetooth is on already, I get the crash. Restarting, restoring, and even the latest iOS updates have not resolved this problem.
Equipment - iPhone 5S (32GB/ATT), iOS 9.3.2
iPhone 5s, iOS 8
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
Appreciate that.
Yeah I am willing to restore from a backup and try that. I should still have the backup before fixing my issue.
Funny enough, I had 2 scosche heart rate monintors and a vivo fit, I used to use.
I will report back my findings, if this does fix it props to you.... After that I will just restore to what I currently have.
Hey,
TL;DR: Curiosity
I had a few devices that were listed but not by anything meaningful; they were basically MAC (network) addresses, or at least that was my assumption. I am a software developer; with that hat on, I just assumed it was down to poor Bluetooth firmware on the device not reporting its name properly, with the MAC address being iPhone's best/fallback effort to uniquely identify a device.
All rationale aside, it was just more smoke for the fire, right.
Plus in principle, having a ÂŁ700 smart phone, I don't want to see that ÂŁ&@$.
So I started removing them; while I was at it I figured I'd remove them all and start from a clean slate, you know, just to see what would happen. Perhaps this is something nurtured as a software dev - knowing two things failing at the same time probably isn't a coincidence; on the other hand, my favourite game as a kid was Final Fantasy 7, in which I covered every square inch of the world map, carried out every quest and defeated every boss - take from that what you will.
Anyway, glad it worked for you
For Iphone 7 or any device with force touch. Force touch the settings icon. Select bluetooth from the pop up menu. Forget all of the phantom (ie. devices you don't even recognize as your current ones). This resolves the problem. You can't do this by simply accessing bluetooth settings in the normal manner, because it will not reveal the failed-paired phantom devices that are crashing bluetooth just the current ones. Hope this helps.
Thank you so much!!!! This worked however I had to delete all of my devices in order to make the phantom devices appear in the list. I deleted current devices, exited Bluetooth and went back only to discover the phantom devices left on the list. Once I deleted those, my Bluetooth screen started working again with no issues!!!! Thank you!!!!!!
Hi A. Heimert,
Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. I can see from your post that when you try to open Settings > Bluetooth, the Settings app quits unexpectedly on you. I know it is nice to be able to pair additional devices to the iPhone. I will be happy to provide some information on this.
Thank you for all the steps you have performed, that helps us out a lot. What we'd want to do next is to Reset All Settings. This won't remove any of your data but it will reset things like settings, Wi-Fi password, VPN settings, Home Screen layout, etc.
To do the reset go to Settings>General>Reset>Reset All Settings. Test it out and see if it's back to working as it normally should.
Based on your post, I can see that you did do a restore. If the above steps didn't work, and if the restore that you already did was from a backup, then the next step would be to make sure that you have a recent backup and then restore to factory settings and set up as new instead of restoring from a backup.
How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Use iTunes on your Mac or PC to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings
Once you set it up as new, please go ahead and test out the Bluetooth settings and see how it now performs. If the Settings app opens ok, you can add the backup back on to the iPhone and then test the app again. If the Settings app continues to quit unexpectedly, then we'd know that there is something in the backup that is causing this to occur.
Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup
Have a great day!
Great solution! Worked here!
This fixed it! Thanks
This worked! Thanks!
It was a couple of heart monitors too. I still use one of them but it seems to be working fine now
Thanks Darren, Your solution worked for me. đź‘Ť
Thanks so much for that. All I had to unpair was my watch and when I restored it I did it from an older restoration. Settings no longer crashes.
Bluetooth settings on iPhone crashes settings
