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-Across at least 4 versions of iOS, I’ve found that if you start the Personal Hotspot while the Wi-Fi is/was recently connected, potential Wi-Fi hotspot clients

-Across at least 4 versions of iOS, I’ve found that if you start the Personal Hotspot while the Wi-Fi is/was recently connected, potential Wi-Fi hotspot clients won’t be able to connect. -My personal workaround is to turn off Personal Hotspot, turn of Wi- Fi, then turn Personal Hotspot back on. This produces a prompt that asks if I want to `Turn on Wi-Fi` or use `Bluetooth and USB only`. Selecting `Turn of Wi-Fi` resolves the issue. -I’ve been doing this for years. I never thought much of it, until at the end of a recent haircut- My stylist was once again fumbling with her Clover card reader. Usually when this happens, I just pay cash. This time I asked if I could take a look. She explained that the Clover gets internet from her iPhone, but occasionally and inexplicably it disconnects. She said sometimes rebooting the iPhone resolves the issue. -I showed her my work around, and she sheepishly admitted that she’d probably forget. She came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam- age and language aren’t making this any easier. I ended up using stitched together, marked up screenshots to save PDF instructions for her. -Until last week it never occurred to me to report this “bug” to Apple. I can’t even remember how I arrived at my workaround.

Nextgrid 7y ago
Bug reporting should also be quick & easy for it to be effective. The Apple bug report process isn't the quickest. It doesn't help that minor bugs/usability issues like that never get corrected (from my experience) so I've personally given up. I wish they'd repurpose the stupid "shake to undo" to report bugs instead and make it automatically start screen recording, allow you to reproduce the bug, edit the video to hide any PII and then upload that along with system information.
- jakear 7y ago
  The sceptic in me says that the cost to go through all those reports, even if they were just text as opposed to video, far outweighs the potential benefit they’d get from fewer bugs in the OS. I don’t think very many people will decide to switch to Android based on a buggy iOS experience.
  - dannypgh 7y ago
    Surely it's a computer, and not a person, handling triage of bug reports. At Apple's scale, bug reports are easily ignorable until there's multiple.
- jonathanberger 7y ago
  I wonder if a new product that would be similar to UserVoice or Fixya could help for this problem. Imagine a site that has elements from the above mentioned and also StackExchange or even the Apple Discussion boards. The input would be people reporting bugs they encounter: is it reproducible? known workarounds? maybe severity ratings. A "page views" count. The output would then be either selling or giving away aggregate reports to vendors, like Apple. "Hey Apple, here are the most important bugs people are reporting. We suggest you fix these first." If anyone has interest discussing this further, get in touch.
  - dwoozle 7y ago
    It’s not like Apple can’t use UserVoice — Microsoft does for some products. Apple just doesn’t need to care about customer feedback very much.
mcculley 7y ago
Apple doesn’t make it easy to report a bug. Most apps don’t. I don’t know why the industry hasn’t settled on a standard icon for “send feedback”.
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  I think the industry has settled on a standard practice of "if you provide a way to send feedback, that feedback point will be rapidly inundated with the communications of idiots".
  - t34543 7y ago
    Security teams are better about fixing bugs. If you can demonstrate an impact things can move faster. Of course, YMMV.
justinclift 7y ago
> Until last week it never occurred to me to report this “bug” to Apple. I can’t even remember how I arrived at my workaround. Pretty much no bug I've ever reported to Apple has been looked at, let alone any kind of fix. So, I stopped reporting anything long before leaving the Apple ecosystem.
hindsightbias 7y ago
I’ve never been able to connect my ipads to hotel wifi on demand. iPhone, mac, no problem. They popup or load the hotel page once I select the ssid. iPad, never. Randomly, after 10-30 minutes, popup appears. A dozen Apple support pages tell me to move closer to the router that my iphone connects to. Each page has eleventy-billion “I have this problem too” with no other mitigation. I’m convinced no Apple employees use hotels. Probably airbnb it or dont travel.
- peapicker 7y ago
  When this happens, in safari go to web address 1.1.1.1 - this almost always triggers the connect page. Used to be a problem at my office for the open-guest network til we got updated wifi network hardware.
  - julianlam 7y ago
    Isn't this now CloudFlare's IP address? Didn't they make a blog post about both hardware and software incorrectly hardcoding 1.1.1.1 to do things instead of doing it properly? I'm surprised Safari does this...
    - peapicker 7y ago
      It isn’t Safari, I’ve done this from Chrome on Windows pcs as well. It seems many networks that use a page you have to read to accept terms before getting wifi enablement use 1.1.1.1, perhaps others too dunno, as a capture page. Once you’ve accepted terms the address passes thru like normal. One example from Cisco: https://community.cisco.com/t5/wireless-mobility-documents/web-authentication-1-1-1-1-login-redirect-issue-wireless-lan/ta-p/3161248 https://community.cisco.com/t5/wireless-mobility-documents/w...
  - atq2119 7y ago
    neverssl.com is set up for precisely this problem.
stevenwoo 7y ago
The latest version of iOS makes it so I have to repeat the turn off wifi turn off hotspot turn on hotspot toggle wifi process many times for non-ios wifi connections. My Macbook connects immediately over bluetooth which is nice but the hotspot wifi is more useful to me personally.
- sixothree 7y ago
  This is my standard procedure even for my iPad mini 4. Fun times.
memco 7y ago
Curious, would something like this be solved with one of the new shortcut automation actions? You might be able to create a button to toggle it on and off for you if those settings are exposed.
sixothree 7y ago
I just always assumed personal hotspots were supposed to NOT work correctly 100% of the time. It never seemed to work right for me; as in ever. I just assumed it was because they were in bed with people who make money off of your paying for more devices.
m463 7y ago
I vaguely remember reporting bugs to apple used to be easier. I tried bugreporter.apple.com and you need to log in as a developer. Has that always been true?

Nextgrid 7y ago

Bug reporting should also be quick & easy for it to be effective. The Apple bug report process isn't the quickest. It doesn't help that minor bugs/usability issues like that never get corrected (from my experience) so I've personally given up. I wish they'd repurpose the stupid "shake to undo" to report bugs instead and make it automatically start screen recording, allow you to reproduce the bug, edit the video to hide any PII and then upload that along with system information.

jakear 7y ago
The sceptic in me says that the cost to go through all those reports, even if they were just text as opposed to video, far outweighs the potential benefit they’d get from fewer bugs in the OS. I don’t think very many people will decide to switch to Android based on a buggy iOS experience.
- dannypgh 7y ago
  Surely it's a computer, and not a person, handling triage of bug reports. At Apple's scale, bug reports are easily ignorable until there's multiple.
jonathanberger 7y ago
I wonder if a new product that would be similar to UserVoice or Fixya could help for this problem. Imagine a site that has elements from the above mentioned and also StackExchange or even the Apple Discussion boards. The input would be people reporting bugs they encounter: is it reproducible? known workarounds? maybe severity ratings. A "page views" count. The output would then be either selling or giving away aggregate reports to vendors, like Apple. "Hey Apple, here are the most important bugs people are reporting. We suggest you fix these first." If anyone has interest discussing this further, get in touch.
- dwoozle 7y ago
  It’s not like Apple can’t use UserVoice — Microsoft does for some products. Apple just doesn’t need to care about customer feedback very much.

mcculley 7y ago

Apple doesn’t make it easy to report a bug. Most apps don’t. I don’t know why the industry hasn’t settled on a standard icon for “send feedback”.

InitialLastName 7y ago
I think the industry has settled on a standard practice of "if you provide a way to send feedback, that feedback point will be rapidly inundated with the communications of idiots".
- t34543 7y ago
  Security teams are better about fixing bugs. If you can demonstrate an impact things can move faster. Of course, YMMV.

justinclift 7y ago

> Until last week it never occurred to me to report this “bug” to Apple. I can’t even remember how I arrived at my workaround. Pretty much no bug I've ever reported to Apple has been looked at, let alone any kind of fix. So, I stopped reporting anything long before leaving the Apple ecosystem.

hindsightbias 7y ago

I’ve never been able to connect my ipads to hotel wifi on demand. iPhone, mac, no problem. They popup or load the hotel page once I select the ssid. iPad, never. Randomly, after 10-30 minutes, popup appears. A dozen Apple support pages tell me to move closer to the router that my iphone connects to. Each page has eleventy-billion “I have this problem too” with no other mitigation. I’m convinced no Apple employees use hotels. Probably airbnb it or dont travel.

peapicker 7y ago
When this happens, in safari go to web address 1.1.1.1 - this almost always triggers the connect page. Used to be a problem at my office for the open-guest network til we got updated wifi network hardware.
- julianlam 7y ago
  Isn't this now CloudFlare's IP address? Didn't they make a blog post about both hardware and software incorrectly hardcoding 1.1.1.1 to do things instead of doing it properly? I'm surprised Safari does this...
  - peapicker 7y ago
    It isn’t Safari, I’ve done this from Chrome on Windows pcs as well. It seems many networks that use a page you have to read to accept terms before getting wifi enablement use 1.1.1.1, perhaps others too dunno, as a capture page. Once you’ve accepted terms the address passes thru like normal. One example from Cisco: https://community.cisco.com/t5/wireless-mobility-documents/web-authentication-1-1-1-1-login-redirect-issue-wireless-lan/ta-p/3161248 https://community.cisco.com/t5/wireless-mobility-documents/w...
- atq2119 7y ago
  neverssl.com is set up for precisely this problem.

stevenwoo 7y ago

The latest version of iOS makes it so I have to repeat the turn off wifi turn off hotspot turn on hotspot toggle wifi process many times for non-ios wifi connections. My Macbook connects immediately over bluetooth which is nice but the hotspot wifi is more useful to me personally.

sixothree 7y ago
This is my standard procedure even for my iPad mini 4. Fun times.

memco 7y ago

Curious, would something like this be solved with one of the new shortcut automation actions? You might be able to create a button to toggle it on and off for you if those settings are exposed.

sixothree 7y ago

I just always assumed personal hotspots were supposed to NOT work correctly 100% of the time. It never seemed to work right for me; as in ever. I just assumed it was because they were in bed with people who make money off of your paying for more devices.

m463 7y ago

I vaguely remember reporting bugs to apple used to be easier. I tried bugreporter.apple.com and you need to log in as a developer. Has that always been true?