Getting an iPhone back on the Wi-Fi network

I am amazed by how the pattern-matching, troubleshooting parts of our brains work.

A little while ago, my father-in-law texted me and said, “Jason, are you available for me to talk to you about a problem with my phone?” This was his problem:

My phone is connected to my Wi-Fi, but it doesn’t show the Wi-Fi symbol. It says LTE and shows cellular bars. But when I go to Settings and Wi-Fi, it says I’m connected and shows me full bars of the Wi-Fi signal.

My troubleshooting brain, trained on hundreds of similar quirks over years and years, swooped into action.

Turn off Wi-Fi and then turn it back on. Nothing new.

Turn cellular off and then turn it on again. Nothing.

Use Wi-Fi settings to forget the home network, then reconnect. Nope.

Turn the phone off and back on. No change.

It was clear that the phone was connected to the base station, and even being assigned an IP address, but for whatever reason, data just wasn’t being routed. Even though every other device at their home was on the Wi-Fi network and working fine, I still had him pull the plug on the router and then plug it back in, just in the hopes that it might shake something loose, some bad routing configuration that would vanish with the power cycle. No luck.

My goal at this point was to find some way to reset the relationship between the Wi-Fi access point and his iPhone, because that was clearly where the problem lay. But how? So frustrating.

At this point, all my instinctual, easy options had been exhausted. So it was time to pull out a classic network troubleshooter, one that’s been on the iPhone since time immemorial for just these sorts of cases. I had him open the Settings app and navigate to Transfer or Reset iPhone: Reset: Reset Network Settings.

Putting this command amid the ones that will erase your phone is a little scary, and your phone even asks you for your password and a second confirmation before proceeding, but it’s the ultimate way to force your iPhone to start its network connectivity completely fresh. (In a way that just forgetting the Wi-Fi network does not.) It’s the last step in Apple’s own advice about failing to properly connect to a Wi-Fi network.

When the reset finally happened, his phone rebooted. He unlocked it. LTE still showed. He connected to the Wi-Fi, and after a nervous moment… the Wi-Fi icon appeared.

Here’s the funny thing: The week after this happened, I ran this scenario past Dan Moren on the Six Colors Podcast. His own troubleshooting brain ran through the exact same steps that I went through, in the same order, until finally reaching Reset Network Settings.

There are other things to try first, but when your iPhone is out-and-out misbehaving when it comes to Wi-Fi, Reset Network Settings is worth a go. It seems scary, but it has very few serious side effects (you’ll lose saved Wi-fi passwords, but that seems like a fair trade for getting connected) and sometimes is all you need to do to get things back on an even keel.