Is there a glitch with iphones that means they start droping wifi connections?

[Londonmummy66]

Posting here for traffic mainly but DD's phone started connecting to wifi and then immediately dropping the connection. Its not a problem with any other devices but it is a problem with all the (several) wifis she's tried since the problem started. A number of her friends have said they have had the problem too and that Apple stores have been really unhelpful basically refusing to see if they can help identify the problem and just telling them that they need to buy a new one. She had the same treatment today at Regent Street. Its not that old a model (a 12) and DH's older one works fine. Has anyone else had this? (She's googled all yesterday afternoon and tried every fix she cold find and nothing works.)

My iPhone doesn’t stay connected to WiFi, I thought it was the WiFi but no other devices have the problem. Mines a 14 and it happened with the previous one.

Never had this problem with an iPhone. Have you googled it? Maybe re-boot?

Mine did this for a bit, also iPhone 12
Particularly on getting home, would take an age to see the router, and drop out too from time to time. Seems to have sorted itself now somehow. Sorry that’s not a ton of help to you though Op.

Thanks for the comments - she did google and tried a lot of different "fixes" but none worked.

How strong is your WiFi signal?

if it’s when she’s got poor WiFi connectivity, and data is better, that’s the reason. It happens for me in my sons room as it’s the furthest from the router - it can see the network and connects but then flips back to 5G as it’s much faster.

I turn off mobile data at home a lot to stop this happening. Doesn’t seem to impact on my ability to stay online so I think the point at which my phone would otherwise decide the WI-FI signal is poorer than using data is set a bit too high.

I get that sometimes but what is annoying me more is it drops to 2 bars of signal randomly which means pages won’t load!
I get temporary relief by turning in airplane mode and turning it off which refreshes it and then it jumps to 4-full bars!

iv had various iPhones always on the same network and lived in the same house and town for years and years and it’s never happened until I got this iPhone 😡 se2nd gen

Have you turned off private browsing? There’s a setting which basically means your iPhone has built in VPN but it means it constantly has to cycle to get connections to WiFi and can cause it to drop out - particularly annoying on home router.

sorry, sent too soon - you can turn it off for specific WiFi connections. I had to turn it off for our router. Also try chrome rather than safari

Thank you - the wifi here is pretty good and none of our other phones or devices have a problem. She's also tried it in a few other places and the result is the same. It connects fine and then a few seconds later disconnects and nothing seems to fix it. It was also absolutely fine in the morning on Wednesday and then just stopped working in the afternoon and hasn't been prepared to reconnect to any wifi anywhere since.

I had this it was a sim problem with tesco mobile, took x 2 new sims to sort. Still does it sometimes but the tesco guys knew all about it.

Put your own sim in the iphone if a different network to test it.

We're all on EE so a different sim won't work sadly

A friend had this issue and a new sim sorted it.

I have similar on my iPhone 14 although it’s more of an issue accessing mobile data when I have a strong 5G signal. Seems a bit more reliable on wifi. I’ve not tried to change to airplane mode and will give this a try. I have been restarting safari which seems to fix the issue temporarily until it happens again and does so repeatedly and quite often at times. It is very, very annoying.

I’m planning to go to the apple shop on Monday to see what they say. I’d say it’s always happened with this phone, at least been slow, since I got the phone in march but has become much more of an issue in the past month or so.

I had this. I called Apple and they sorted it out for me

Replacement SIMs can sort out all sorts of problems that you never expect.

I got a new android phone recently and all numbers came up as unknown even though the numbers where in my contact list.

New SIM sorted it out

Just call EE and ask them to send a replacement SIM.

Do you have a repeater? I’ve had the same problem since installing one.

Just be prepared for them to say they won't investigate what is wrong with your phone and tell you you need to buy a new one if yours isn't working (and they'll give you a princely £50 discount to trade the old one in...)

Sadly she succumbed to the Apple script and bought a new phone - she's really upset as she's a student and its screwed her budget for the whole of next term😢

It does seem that there are a number of issues and Apple cba to sort them out and see it as an opportunity to upsell rather than deliver the customer service you'd expect from something costing a few hundred £££. I spoke to Apple customer services yesterday and the guy was one of the most patronising people I've ever spoken to which left a really unpleasant taste behind.

It’d be interesting to see if that gets better when people go back to work/school next week; and the internet isn’t under so much strain.

@Londonmummy66 Unfortunately she was absolutely done then. The Genius Bar is very helpful and she should have been able to avoid any sales people; and her phone was worth far more than £50. I got £400 for an old iPhone 14 from Apple last week and it was quite scratched down one side of the phone (not the screen).

Is there a cooling off period? Can she still change her mind?

I've recently got a new iPhone 15 pro and I'm having the same issue. Defo an apple glitch.

It’s not the phone.

Reset the router. It was happening to mine and I took the advice and it fixed it. I’m not technical enough to explain the issue with temporary IPs or something or other. But it fixed it anyway! It’s a recognised thing and you can google it. Worth a try?