For several months, my mom's phone has had a strange location-sharing problem. She can see other people, but nobody can see her location. She also can't share her location or accept invitations— the app just spins for a while and then shows an error. This originally happened on her iPhone 12 mini, where Find My had worked normally for years, and the problem continued after upgrading to an iPhone 17 Pro. We've checked the relevant settings, confirmed location services are enabled, compared her configuration with working phones, added a passcode, removed and re-added contacts, deleted and reinstalled the app, and even tried restoring the phone from a backup after resetting it. Nothing has fixed it. What else could be causing this?
2 Answers
A full backup, factory reset, and restore can clear corrupted system settings that survive a normal upgrade. However, since that was already done during the move to the newer phone, it probably isn’t the solution here.
Check Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services, then find the location-sharing app in the list and make sure it can access location while in use. Also scroll to the bottom of Location Services, open System Services, and verify the relevant location-related services are enabled.
We already tried that during the transition from the old phone to the new one, and the problem continued afterward.