Wife's iPhone keeps re-pairing to my AirPods

Tech Support
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1

Ever since this current revision of OS’s, my wife’s iPhone will pair to my AirPods Pro (2nd gen). This has happened multiple times and seemingly happens without either of us being aware. She doesn’t remember ever going through a pairing exercise.

To try and resolve, I’ve gone into the Settings and done “Forget this device”. I’ve reset my AirPods at least once. It will seem fine for a while and then a week or 2 later, she’ll play something on her phone and it will come through my AirPods while I’m in the other room.

Potential FAQ:

Do you share an iCloud account?

No. We each have our own dedicated accounts. We have family sharing on, but otherwise keep everything iCloud very separate.

Are you signed into iCloud on her phone?

No. She has her accounts setup. There’s no evidence of my account showing up except for family sharing.

Has she accidentally paired to them with the popup?

According to her, no. It might have happened once by accident at some point, but this is a recurring problem.

Are you current on your OS’s?

We have 5 devices in the household:

  • iPhone 14 Pro (mine) - iOS 18.1
  • iPhone 12 Pro (hers) - iOS 17.x (not sure which point version she’s on)
  • MBP 14" (shared) - macOS 15.1
  • 2018 iPad Pro (mine) - iPadOS 18.0.1 (I’m ashamed it’s not up to date)
  • 2018 mac Mini (server, mine) - macOS 14.5 (I just haven’t gotten around to updating it)

I have a suspicion the shared laptop is the cause of the problem. We each have our own accounts on the machine, and they’re both signed into iCloud. Because I frequently connect my AirPods to the laptop, maybe there’s a bug in macOS 15 that’s causing this cross-sharing of devices, but I don’t know. This never seemed to be a problem before macOS 15. In fact, she was always getting annoyed at the notifications on her phone saying my AirPods were tracking her, but that’s a problem for a different day.

2

I’m going to go creative here. What if the issue is not with the Airpods and is Airplay related? A Mac can be configured as an Airplay receiver and your wife’s iPhone could be happily finding it (“Settings > Airplay & Continuity”, is “Automatically AirPlay” enabled?) hence the confusion. Also, for this hypothesis to be true, you would find that the offending audio from the iPhone comes only when your Airpods are connected to your desktop mac, not your personal iPhone.

3

That’s an interesting idea! I’ll check her phone when I get a chance. It does leave open some questions though.

  1. Why do my AirPods show up in her Bluetooth settings?
  2. Why would the handoff happen when I’m in my account? Perhaps it’s tied to if she’s logged in on the computer but just locked, but that would also feel like a big security concern to me.
  3. I think this happened once when I was using either my phone or iPad and not my computer, but I haven’t documented that so I can’t be certain.

Love the creative idea though, thanks for sharing!

4

I have something similar happening. I handed down a pair of AirPods Pro to one of my kids and they randomly try to reconnect to my devices. I have absolutely positively gone through the unpairing and removing from my AppleID process. It’s weird and a bit disconcerting.