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iOS 7: iMessage and FaceTime Problems and their solutions

By 3 comments Last updated September 29, 2013

iMessage and FaceTime are wonderful that are the proofs of Apple’s innovation and creativeness in the smartphone world. They are awesome, but they can as well freak you out, especially when you update your iPhone or restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to updated version of iOS- just like what millions of people did with the release of iOS 7. And for some users, these services stopped working.

Many users complained in the Apple forum that after updating their devices to iOS 7, they immediately found iMessage and FaceTime were not working. Those apps hung on to authentication and didn’t progress at all. Some people who use different email/passwords to log into their iMessage/iCloud and iTunes are being affected the most.

If you’re looking for its solution because they won’t activate or simply won’t work, here are some things users can try to get (at least) a better result:

(Make sure that you have the latest version of iTunes installed into your computer. )

  1. Back the phone up using iTunes. Users need a computer-based backup, but not iCloud.
  2. Now, unplug your phone from your computer.
  3. Users need to reset their phone to its factory settings. Go to General in Settings for Reset. Select “Erase all content and settings”.
  4. At the time the phone restarts, select “Set up as New Phone”.
  5. Connect your phone with a Wi-Fi Network. The set-up preamble will ask the user for his Apple ID, etc. Without entering them, just click “skip” and go to the home screen.
  6. From the home screen, log serial wise into iMessage, FaceTime, and iCloud (if user is using it) and iTunes.
  7. Go back to iTunes and make sure iTunes has “Prevent iPhone from automatically syncing when connected” checked in the Preferences under Devices.
  8. Simply connect your iPhone to iTunes and then restore from the backup. Don’t do a complete restore for now. You got backup, so don’t worry, you can do that anytime.
  9. The iPhone will now go through the restore from the backup process.

Some of the users’ iPhones also asked for their iMessage and FaceTime logins after it woke from the back up process, but before the whole restore process was completed. After entering those, it continued to install apps users have installed previously on their iPhone.

More: FaceTime / iMessage waiting for activation, how to fix

Now, your iPhone is ready again to let you use your favorite iMessage and FaceTime services. iOS 7 is a new OS, and no new OS is free from small bugs like these. In time, Apple will solve these problems to give their customers a better experience.

Hope these information helped you. Don’t brick your phone! 🙂

More: iOS6: Messages (iMessage) not working, How to fix

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  1. Hi there I have an I phone 4. I’m from the uk. I’m staying over in Cyprus for a while since I’ve been here I have not been able to log into my FaceTime or I message , it just says can’t sign in check network status. I’ve tried it on different wifis and mobile network giffgaff. But it says the same thing , everything else works from safari to AppStore . Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to fix this. Thanks. Regards
    David 🙂

    Reply

  2. When we first had an IPad, Face Time worked well. After a few months, it started to be a problem. If we make the call connection on Face Time, then it all works for a few seconds, I.e. We can both see and hear each other, then our picture freezes and ‘poor connection’ comes up on our screen, yet we can hear them and they can both see and hear us. If they then make the call connection exactly the same happens, but we then freeze on them and the ‘poor connection’ message comes up, they can hear us and we can see and hear them.

    How do we solve this?

    Thanks

    Reply