So i finally manage to figure it out what is actually the problem with the iPhone hotspots. As i have two phones, one i use day by day and one is home safe, i forget my day by day phone last night at the club, i had to pun my rabbit r1 sim card into my new iPhone 15 pro max. The sim is from LEBARA and for my surprising it actually connected to the iPhone hotspot.
Seems like some providers allow hotspot and some don’t. Hope this was the mystery of the hotspot connectivity and can help others in this situation and try new providers and solve this issue.
By the way, if you own an iPhone 15 Pro Max, have you updated to version 18.1 Beta? This version has Apple Intelligence and might be a bit interesting.
If you want to upgrade, you only need to open the Apple Store, download the Apple Developer Program, log in to your account, register for the Apple Developer Program. Then open the system’s [Settings] [Software Update] and you can see the upgrade option.
I was one of the first to mention that the r1 cant see my hotspot. As an iPhone user i thought at first that is the incompatibility with Android devices.
At some other times i tried to see if this happen with other iPhones then mine, i think till now i manage to connect to 5 different iPhones. After i saw that changing the provider to one of my iPhones let me then access the iPhone hotspot I can only conclude that the issues stays perhaps with the provider as well. I might be wrong or indeed is an uncertain factor. But if there are users that can’t connect to their hotspot at the moment and want to test this “going around” solution would be good to see.
As I understand it, the issue is entirely related to iPhones with T-Mobile service.
Here’s my understanding of what’s going on. This may not be completely technically accurate, as it’s not my speciality field, but it’s my understanding of the basics.
On iOS, when you enable your hotspot, the hotspot contains metadata that identifies it as being a T-Mobile connection but not the native device connection. T-Mobile still have a system in place that requires devices connecting to their network via hotspot to be certified on their network, which is a process that the hardware manufacturer must go through with the network.
On Android, this doesn’t happen. Enabling hotspot on Android effectively turns your phone into a generic router. T-Mobile can’t identify whether it’s in hotspot mode or not.
So - the solution here is that rabbit must go through the certification process with T-Mobile. Which seems a little strange since you can just pop in a T-Mobile SIM already into r1 and it’ll work. It seems to be only related to hotspotting another device to a T-Mobile sim inside an iOS device.
Good news? We are starting the conversations to go through that certification process.
For T-Mobile this could be the cause, but it seemed unlikely to me that new device manufactures would have to find out which providers in which countries needed certification and then go through all those certification processes.
So I dug a little further and found that for my mobile data provider (KPN NL) it is related to IPv4 support rather than device certification. It can be fixed by altering the APN used for hotspots. Or, possibly, by adding IPv6 support on the R1.
