Can't turn off Find my Phone

Rod


Joined
Jun 12, 2011
Messages
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Location
Melbourne, Australia and Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Your Mac's Specs
2021 M1 MacBook Pro 14" macOS 13, iPhone SE 2, iPad 6, Apple Watch SE.
This is more of a FYI than a question. This morning my wife found that she could not connect to the internet on her iPhone 4 running iOS 7, all other devices were working fine. I did the usual things, retarted, rebooted, turned WiFi off then on, got the phone to "forget" the WiFi network then located and logged back in, checked Settings and found everything to be the same as my iPhone 4 also running iOS 7 I even tried turning on and off Airplane mode. We then did a sync with no improvement but uploaded her current photos to her laptop (just in case) and I suggested she perform a Restore.
This is when we ran into trouble: iOS 7 now incorporates a new security feature that prevents Restore or Erase via iTunes until you switch off Find my Phone. Don't get me wrong this is a good feature, it requires you to enter your Apple ID in order to switch Find my Phone off. Perhaps you are ahead of me already, how to switch off Find my Phone without an internet connection? Well the simple answer is; turn off WiFi (because the phone prefers this) turn on Cellular Data if it's not already on, and enter your Apple ID via the cellular network. Simple eh? Not so if you don't have a working cellular network. Unfortunately as we are in a relatively remote area of Indonesia at this time this was the case. So what to do?
Well I found a strange workaround; go to Settings > WiFi > click the "i" button at the right end of your WiFi network name and scroll down to HTTP Proxy and set to Auto. This fixed the issue! Suddenly I was able to access the web via WiFi, turn off FMP and perform a Restore. My iPhone had HTTP Proxy switched Off and worked fine and after Restore on my wife's phone is now switched off on hers as well and internet works fine. To say I don't understand this would be an understatement but what works, works I guess.
If anybody can shine any light on this I would love to hear it. At the end of the day it's all just part of the ever-changing, wonderful world of Apple software.
 

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