The IT Nerd

Since getting the GTA Car Kits Pure Bluetooth Kit last week, I’ve had some intermittent problems pairing my iPhone 6 to the car kit. The core symptom is the iPhone 6 would pair, but not completely. I could make and receive phone calls via the car kit, but music would not stream. I knew that the car kit wasn’t the cause as a reboot of my iPhone would temporally fix the issue. Plus my wife’s iPhone 6 was fine. Thus it had to be my phone. Bluetooth problems in relation to car infotainment systems seem to have surfaced when iOS 8 appeared. Even though Apple acknowledged the problem and issued a fix in iOS 8.1, the problems still persist in iOS versions up to 8.3 if you do Google searches on the issue.

Now this is not new for me as I’ve been hired by car owners to dealerships to assist in pairing iOS devices to the infotainment systems in cars because for whatever reason, things go sideways with a process that should be very simple. Based on those experiences, I’ve come up with a list of things to try if you’re having problems pairing or using a iOS device in your car that consistently work for me:

1. Confirm that the issue is not the car: The quickest way to do that is to reboot the iOS device. If it instantly pairs and works properly, then you know that the car is not responsible. Another way to do this is to turn off and on Bluetooth on the iOS device in question. But I find that the reboot option is far more effective at isolating the problem.
2. Try forgetting the device: Once you’ve confirmed that the iOS device is the problem, try going into Settings –> Bluetooth and find the name of the infotainment system in the list. Click the “i” and then click on “Forget This Device”. That deletes the profile from your iOS device. Then simply pair it up again and see if it pairs properly.
3. Reset the network settings: If option 2 doesn’t work, you’ll have to reset network settings. One thing that I need to warn you about is that any passwords for WiFi networks and the like will be erased and you’ll have to add them again. But the benefit of doing is that it cleans up all the network settings including Bluetooth and make some issues go away. Simply go to Settings –> General –> Reset –> Reset Network Settings and follow the prompts and wait for your iOS device to reboot. It’s also a good idea to do option 2 over again to make sure everything is cleaned up.
4. If all else fails, do a restore of your iOS device from iTunes: This sounds like a brute force method to solve a simple problem, but I can say that this does work if all of the above options fail to work. The process is quite simple and is detailed here. The key thing to remember is that you need to back up the contents of your iOS device. The process to do that is detailed here. You’ll need to restore from that back up once the restore is complete. Budget for about an hour or more if you have a lot of data on your iPhone. The good news is that you’ll get some space freed up in the process.

In case you were wondering what worked for me in my case, I had to go to option 4 to get this problem resolved. As I type this, there have been no issues since. But I continue to monitor the situation as I fully expect the upcoming iOS 8.4 to either make this problem manifest itself again or make things better. Thus Apple may want to invest some time and effort into fixing the issue once and for all.

This entry was posted on June 23, 2015 at 8:58 am and is filed under Tips with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.