What happened to "Find My?"

I’ve used “Find My” on my iPhone for a long time to keep track of family devices, including to check up on kids (one with iPhone, one with an Apple Watch). I just upgraded one kid from the watch to a new phone, and we had some issues, so Apple CS did some troubleshooting with me and had me update my OS to 17.3.1 from whatever old version I was running (I’m intentionally a very late adopter with any OS). We seemed to have sorted out all of the increasingly complex settings including all the Parental Controls, but I’ve noticed that the Find My is very, very slow to update now. For example, we use Find My to see if the kids are still at practice / game or if they are on their way home. When it was the latter, we could actually watch their little user icon moving through the map in real time. Since the update though, the icons not only don’t move anymore, they only seem to update every so often. We were testing the new phone yesterday, and it showed the location as not having changed from being at school to being at home a good 5 minutes after my daughter had already arrived at home. So that was probably 20 minutes in between updates.

Other than the hardware addition, and the software update, there has been no changes to anything obvious in this situation to explain the change in behavior. Has anyone else noticed this? Or maybe I’m all of a sudden doing something incorrectly? Obviously if there is a 20 minute update delay in Find My, the utility of this application is greatly reduced.

I’ve not noticed any difference. It seems to be working for me as it always has including updating in pretty much realtime when you look at a particular person.

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All ok here as well, upgraded phones and watches and still as relatively quick to update.

I have no solution for you, but I have also noticed over the past month or two that it is more temperamental. It seems to be “my device” specific where it will occasionally not be able to find any of my 5 friends i.e. it’s all or nothing. It seems to have settled again over the past two weeks so I’m hoping it’s a temporary service blip that has righted itself.

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That’s nice that yours has “settled,” but I’ve had no such luck. Apple Tech Support wasn’t much help either. I see the spinning “updating” wheel a lot, but often no change for many hours. This is on an SE3 running 17.3.1, which was fine on iOS16.

Have you tried restart all the “find my” devices. I have had this happen as well and turning off and turning back on the devices seems to help.

For a while, maybe since iOS 16, I’ve habitually force-quit Find My on the phone before looking at it. Seems to be the only way to get it to refresh info on devices.

OTOH, Find My on macOS (14.4) updates regularly. What this and not that? Probably one of iClouds’ many mysteries.

Katie