IOS 14 WiFi

Yes, my phone constantly disconnects from wifi for no reason and this has never been an issue with my computer or any other device. I've followed so many "troubleshooting tips" that I've found online, including Apple's own, and absolutely nothing works.

I keep seeing people in the comments say that turning off your VPN and Private Address fixes everything and that has not worked for me AT ALL. And even if it did, I should be able to use the VPN that I pay for every year for internet security which is something that Apple encourages ironically enough. Get your sh*t together Apple, we pay WAY too much our WiFi to only work half the time.

Yes a maddening issue... although I truly do not know the root cause I found that my Netgear Nighthawk router suddenly did not allow my phone to connect. I have set connectivity permissions to manually allow only certain Mac/WiFi addresses on my router.

After the update my router did not recognize my phone and I had to go into my router and RE-permit my phone to acesss. After that, no issues.

In response to Blort's post:

This is what I had to do as well, revert to a lesser level of security, which iOS warns against doing, Ha! That said, once I did this, my wifi worked as expected.

I sent the text from tarnation's post to Netgear, waiting on a response.

Yes, same here. I had my wifi upgraded and as you experienced, I couldn't connect my wifi and kept giving me 'no connection' warnings (except weirdly enough, it allowed me to access facebook products). Anyway, after reading this, I deleted my VPN. I agree, this is wrong and needs a fix. I just renewed it 2 weeks ago... Apple, what say you??

Yes. After a week on this 14.2 iOS now my wifi setting won’t turn on. I can’t connect to any WiFi connection. This needs fixed ASAP.

turning off bluetooth also solves the issue for me.

edit: iphone 11 pro
issue: wifi connection is not dropping, it seems like then I take my iphone out of sleep, e.g. whatsapp always says 'connecting' -> only the first few seconds, after that it works as normal. This is a problem however, connection seems to be lost when sleeping. Also turning off bluetooth sucks for other connected devices.

Hi all - I am following up on Conneires comments posted 1 day ago. Conneires is on to something. After trying all of the **** (apple replaced the word '**' with **** apple is very sensitive) (wow - think of a synonym for dumb) recommendations that are designed to eliminate problems by blind process of elimination (i.e. turn your phone off, turn it back on; turn your iPhone wifi off, turn it back on; turn your iPhone airplane mode on and off, turn your iPhone settings on and off, reset your iPhone settings, restore your iPhone settings - blah blah blah - "is your device plugged in to power source?". Just before I decided to chuck my phone out the window into a pond, I deleted my Express VPN app. Guess what? As soon as I did that everything - all of my apps and wifi connections are now back and fully functioning. Therefore, my genius tech sleuthing informs me that this DARN problem is a VPN matter. Delete your VPN app, get back on the internet, punch apple in the face. Now to figure out how to get VPN working.

I have been dealing with this issue ever since 14.0 rolled out. I’m currently on iPad OS 14.2 and have tried all the fixes and everyday I have to re-acquire my Wi Fi multiple times throughout the day. One of the comments I read from Apple leads me to believe this has more to do w/ security encryption standards on your WiFi rather than anything else. I will be installing a new AX router ($ 70) today w/ WPA3 encryption. I hope this solves the problem because the disconnects happen at the most annoying times. All of the current fixes listed on the Internet work the same as my connection drops sporadically and no one fix seems to be any more effective than the rest. Additionally, my understanding is that once you have committed to iOS 14.0/ iPad OS 14.0 or higher you can no longer go back to 13. I believe we are all being forced to upgrade to WiFi6 aka AX w/ WPA3 encryption.

Found that Wi-Fi private address feature in iOS 14 caused problems for me. After recent (2020-11) update to 14.2, Wi-Fi private address was enabled by default. This feature causes the phone to generate a new MAC address for each new wifi network it registers with. At home, we have 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, and the phone generated new MAC addresses for itself on both of these bands. So effectivity phone now has 3 MAC addresses at home: original non-private MAC, new private 2.4GHz MAC, new private 5Ghz MAC. I added these new MAC address into the "allowed" list on my router and all is good again. For anyone "locked out" of their network and unable to edit router access control list, simply disable the Wi-Fi Private Addresses feature and your phone should return to its original MAC address.

iOS 14.2 clearly has some serious bugs! We have both an iPad Air and an iPhone 11 Pro showing miserable, unreliable WiFi performance. We have tried many of the usual solutions (e.g. reset network on Apple device, reset router) without success. The most amazing result was when we tried the advice I found to turn on flight mode: nothing happened! The iPad Air shows flight mode enabled, but WLAN and Bluetooth still turned on and WLAN still connected!

In response to MooreKen099's post:

How did testing with the new router go?

I can connect to my wi-fi but it is way slower inside apps.

As a F/U to my earlier post. After upgrading to a new WiFi 6 router and enabling WPA2/WPA3 it has been 48 hours and I have yet to lose connection. Keep in mind iPad Pro running iPad OS 14.2 and it is AX (WiFi6) capable. I have an old iPhone7 and it has yet to lose connection as well.

iPhone 12 Pro max

I am experiencing the same issue. I just spent $1300 on this phone and my Oneplus7T triples its wifi speed. It’s ridiculous. I am currently next to my Netgear X6 R8000 Nighthawk router that has been amazing for every other device in my house. Weird thing is I only get over 80 mbps download on my 2.4ghz band. The router is Tri-band!!! And both 5G get under 20 MBPS. I ran an ookla speed test. Thought I’d share the results.

Code Block 
2.4 GHz
Download: 98.9 MBPS 
Upload: 76.0 MBPS 
5GHz 
Download: 1.24 MBPS (I’m lucky to get to 20 sometimes) 
Upload: 14.3 MBPS

On my laptop i get well over 200 mbps for both. I have the private setting turned off, set a static ip, changed the DNS, and reset the network without luck. I work in IT and this just boggles my mind. My $500 Oneplus should not be faster than a phone almost triple in price. How is it that only my 2.4GHZ connection gets okish speeds??? I thought I would share this with everyone because this is NOT getting the coverage it needs in the media. My brother has an iPhone 7 and just ran the same test and got 165 mbps download and 130 MBPS upload. My mind is doing cartwheels right now.