TL;DR
Sometime between 11/17 & 11/20, I became unable to place my nearly daily FaceTime call to my parents' iPad. Spent all day with Apple Support yesterday on this with no success. My parents' iPad is maxed out at 12.5.7, which according to the advisor, is incompatible with recent server upgrades. When I place a call using their Apple ID (not associated with a phone number), their iPad never rings & never shows a missed call. When they call my iPad, mine never rings in any case, the setting of "allow calls from" during "do not disturb" doesn't even show any notification of an incoming call, and on both iPads, the auto-answer setting (even without DND) stopped working.
The long version
I spent all day off and on yesterday with Apple support, debugging a new problem that popped up with Facetime sometime between 11/17/2023 and 11/20/2023 (inconveniently, right before Thanksgiving).
Background: when the pandemic lockdown happened, I created what I refer to as a "Facetime portal" to keep my elderly parents company while I worked. I blogged about the details of the setup, but essentially, I'd created secondary iCloud accounts, set up each iPad to only accept calls from known callers, and turned on auto-answer. Everything has worked swimmingly, aside from a few minor hiccups, between that time in 2020 and this past Friday. I created a simple shortcut on each iPad so that either of us could start the portal with a single tap (all it does it place a facetime call to the other party). It would place the call, each party would briefly hear a ring (both outgoing and incoming) and you would see yourself first and then the callee a second later, as the other device would immediately answer.
The problem: When I attempted to start the portal (as I have done almost every other day since 2020), I got this innocuous (but unusual/atypical) message:
After tapping OK, I then got this error message:
And the call would never go through. My parents were never notified by their iPad that any sort of call was coming in. After the first occurrence of the message/error, I no longer see those messages when I try to initiate a call.
We also tried it the other way around. I had them place the FaceTime call to my iPad. I could see the incoming call, but the auto-answer would not pick up. I had to tap twice: once to "accept the invite" and then: to "join" the call.
The behavior of the outgoing call was different on my end too. Usually when I place the call, I would see myself fill the screen and would hear an outgoing "ringing" sound, then once it connected, my image would shrink to the corner and my parents' feed would fill the rest of the screen. Now however, instead of seeing myself and hearing a "ring", a generic green icon comes up with the message "invite sent", there is no sound, and it never goes through.
According to Apple support, there was apparently an update to Apple's server that routes FaceTime calls, and the problem is that my parents' iPad is maxed out at iOS 12.5.7. Mine WAS on 16.3.1, but as a part of the debug process, I updated to 16.7.2 (but still see the same behavior).
The advisor was unable to figure out how to resolve the issue, but he believed that the old iPad became too far out of date with Apple's servers. He did suggest a way to try and fuss with it to try and get it to start working, and that was to log out and back in to iCloud on both devices, though we haven't tried that yet. I also saw a youtube video posted 4 days ago that references the error message that suggests offloading the FaceTime app and doing a hard-restart - but I haven't tried that yet either.
A more drastic solution would be for my parents to get a new iPad, but the problem there is, upon iOS 14, auto-answer started requiring the device to be unlocked (and according to an Apple Advisor at the time, the intention was that it was to work with FaceID, which neither of our iPads have, thus, you must touch the iPad to answer the call). Prior to that (in iOS 13), auto-answer would still work, regardless of the device being locked. I had an older iPad Mini at the time, and to get around that, I turned off auto-lock, however that caused the screen to precipitously deteriorate, since it was on 24/7. And since getting my new iPad, I have just been the one to start the portal, since mine won't auto-answer when the screen is dark.
Aside from suggesting possible solutions for the 2 current devices to make the FaceTime calls both go through and auto-answer, I would also like to ask if anyone can confirm if there is a way to have auto-answer work (without having to touch the iPad regardless of lock) in the latest iPadOS. (I can't imagine how that's not an option given the purpose of auto-answer is to allow people who are for example, quadriplegics, to be able to take phone calls.)
UPDATE
I was reviewing my blog. I'd forgotten that part of my setup was to create a contact card group and then setup "Do not disturb"/"Focus" to allow calls from that group (purpose-being so that the iPad will only auto-answer callers in that group). I hadn't had focus turned on on my (new) iPad, so I turned it on and set the "allow calls from" to the group containing the contact card. When that is set, despite the "allow calls from" setting, my iPad does not ring or give any sign a call is coming in until after the call attempt has ended (in which case, the FaceTime app icon gets a badge about a missed call).
I confirmed that my parents' iPad was still set to DND and that the group was still set to be allowed and contained the contact card. So we also tested turning off DND on their iPad running iPadOS 12.5.7. No FaceTime call (me -> parents) goes through and no missed call appears in FaceTime.
