My wife and I have a lot of ties in China, and as such, spend a good amount of time on FaceTime with one end in the states and one end in China. For the last two weeks, making a FaceTime call would show the status “connecting” for an instant and then fail.

I did a bunch of research, trying to make this work, contacted carious friends in China, and tried a few things. (We were a bit paralyzed on one end because my parents in-law aren’t too tech savvy, and it’s harder to explain things to then when we can’t, well, FaceTime.)

Research showed that devices purchased since mid 2013 in China had certain limitations because of a Chinese patent for a similar technology. But each of the devices we were trying had been purchased in the US (and unlocked if applicable).

Turns out the solution was simple: they were running an older version of iOS 6. Stepping them through an upgrade to iOS 7 was reasonably easy over the phone/iMessage, and once the upgrade was complete (and they remembered their passwords), we were golden.

For anyone with similar issues, this was problematic for us only in mid April, 2014.