Macboy

Earl and I use Find My Friends on our iPhones quite frequently, including when I’m out on a long distance cycling adventure, he uses the app to find my whereabouts when I’m ready to be picked up. Since upgrading our iPhones to iOS7, Find My Friends’ functionality has been spotty at best.

This irritates me.

I think I have found a solution to the problem via the Apple Forums. I know that others are having issues with Find My Friends (Erik, Mark), perhaps they will find this helpful as well.

The suggestions in the forum post I have quoted below worked for me, but I needed to have the Find My Friends app running in order to make these things work. Once I got everything set the way it’s described below, it stayed that way.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION
(or at least something that some people may have overlooked)

In iOS 7, if Find My Friends is working for you WHEN THE APP IS RUNNING, i.e. you can see the Locations of family members and they can see you as long as everyone has the App running, BUT it doesn’t work once the App is closed (or wasn’t launched since the last restart,) then check the following:

Make sure the app is listed in Background App Refresh under Settings > General … In my case the FMF App was NOT listed there. I chatted at length with an Apple Support Rep trying various things (reboots, Airplane Mode on and off, etc.) She was unable to explain to me how Apps qualify to show up in that list, or how to get an App onto the list. What finally worked for me was DELETING the Find My Friends App and then reinstalling it from the App Store (Purchases.) It then showed up in the Background App Refresh List, I confirmed it was turned On, and FMF instantly started working as expected! I was afraid I would have to re-enter Follower information or re-send Invitations to Friends after reinstalling, but those settings were retained.

Note: I also happened to update to iOS 7.0.2 earlier today, so I’m not sure if that mattered or not.

Find My Friends also MUST be listed under Settings > Privacy > Location Services, and must be turned On, obviously.

When upgrading an iPhone there are lots of things to do, so it’s easy to answer a screen prompt about Location Services or Background App Refresh the “incorrect” way (at least incorrect with respect to Find My Friends working properly.) Sometimes it’s not easy to go back and find the specific Setting where that function is adjusted…

I hope this information helps other families get FMF working for their devices. Ours are all now working reliably.

Somebody switched his iPhone 5 back to iOS 6. While I’m probably not allowed to say much of this because of developer agreements, I will tell you that when iOS 7 is released this autumn it is going to be awesome and people will love it. It will definitely breathe new life into your iDevice.

That being said, as expected, beta 1 is not ready for primetime yet. It’s the start of something great, but I can’t use it on my main iPhone right now. It’s too unstable for my needs. All of that is OK and expected. What I kind of didn’t expect was not being able to restore my iCloud backup to iOS 6. So I just finished reverting my phone back to the latest “real” version of iOS and then manually setting it up to my liking. I had to download all of my apps one by one again.

My phone is flying in regards to speed. I’m a very happy camper.

So the keynote speech from Apple’s WWDC is less than an hour away. As a geek, and more importantly, as a nearly rabid Apple fanboy (I admit it!), I’m not only excited but I am über excited to see what Apple will be talking about during this keynote speech. Expected topics include announcements of a new version of iOS for the iPhone/iPad/iPod (iOS 7) which reportedly will have a new, “flatter” look to it and a new version of OS X. OS X has traditionally been named after “big cats”, but banners seen at the Moscone Center in San Francisco show a big ocean wave, so my guess is “Sea Lion”, but we’ll see.

The “DC” in WWDC stands for “Developer’s Conference”, so this is traditionally where Apple shares what’s coming up for their various computing platforms. While updates to Apple hardware aren’t out of the question, there probably won’t be some six-inch iPhone 6 coming out, but on the safe side, Earl and I have held off on adding a new iPad to the MacInHouse before hearing what is announced today.

I can’t wait to see what Apple announces today.

Speaking of iPads, I have been giving some serious consideration to making my iPad my main computing device. My MacBook Pro is from 2008 and the iMac is from 2009 (the work MacBook Pro from 2010 doesn’t count) and lately I have been finding that much of what I want to do can be accomplished on my iPad, especially when teamed up with my keyboard from The Brydge. Earl has expressed an interest in getting a full-sized iPad for work purposes, so there has been talk about shuffling some iDevices in the family around so that I can get an iPad with more storage. Only time will tell.

Less than 45 minutes until the big keynote! I’ll probably blog more about it later today. Who am I kidding, of course I will! In the meantime, I’ll make popcorn to snack on for the big event, which will be on in the corner as I work on my work stuff from my home office.

Apple addressed the iPhone tracking issue that’s been a hot topic lately. If you want to read their response to this, you can take a look here.