Friday, November 21, 2014

iOS 8, AT&T MVNO and the endless searching Personal Hotspot bug: toggle Bluetooth

We’re on 8.1.1 and I’ve discovered our first significant bug - the Personal Hotspot icon is stuck in endless “searching” spin on two of the 3 children’s H2O Wireless (AT&T MVNO) iPhone 4s and 4.

IMG 2038

It’s a new problem, likely related to the new Instant Hotspot features of 8.1 (even though it’s not supported on these older phones), but there was a variant of this in older iOS versions. The phones use the H2O “Locus” configuration Profile though, so I can’t follow old advice to edit APN settings.

I think there’s also a contribution to the bug from restrictions on making changes to cellular data (restricted on the children’s phones).

There’s a workaround though, one that I came up after realizing one of the 3 phones didn’t have the stuck Hotspot search. That phone had Bluetooth disabled, and Bluetooth is needed for Instant Hotspot functionality.

So I disabled Bluetooth on the #3’s phone and the endless search stopped, instead I saw “Set up Personal Hotspot”. I reenabled Bluetooth and the bug didn’t return. On #2’s phone Bluetooth was off, and enabling it stopped the search.

So it seems all I have to do is toggle Bluetooth. 

There is still weird stuff here. All 3 devices have the same Profile and H2O plan, but one 4s has the “Personal Hotspot” functionality and the other two say bring up a “Call AT&T to enable” dialog. I’m still playing around to see if I can fix that.

1 comment:

  1. Hey were you able to crack it after all ? I moved from Android to iPhone, its really hard to sink in that a simple thing like hostspot can be made so complicated ! for me despite of bluetooth being on/off, I see the endless spinning of wheel. Some random times contact AT&T shows up. I'm also on H2o

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