How to Disable the Malfunctioning “AirPods Left Behind” Notification
Has this ever happened to you? You’re minding your own business when suddenly your iPhone pops up the message “AirPods Left Behind”. You panic, wondering where you might have dropped your expensive headphones until you realize they never left your pocket. What gives, iPhone?
Before we get into the problem, let’s explain how this feature is supposed to work. The Apple Notify When Away option is available for AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and AirPods 3 when paired with any iPhone 12 or iPhone 13 device. Since these headphones are compatible with the Find Me network, they can communicate with other iPhones in the world to update your location. While it’s not a live GPS signal, it’s certainly useful as you’ll be able to see where your AirPods last had contact with another iPhone owner.
When working properly, this feature should send you a notification when you’ve been separated from your AirPods for a certain amount of time. To avoid being notified every time you intentionally leave your AirPods somewhere, you can specify specific places where this feature doesn’t work. If you don’t want your iPhone to alert you every time you leave your AirPods at home, for example, you can set your address as such a location.
The problem here is that lately your iPhone may be warning you that your AirPods are left behind when they are actually still on you. I get these warnings all the time. Sometimes my iPhone thinks I left my AirPods in my last location; other times it claims my AirPods were left on the highway 10 minutes ago.
The issue seems to be related to an AirPods firmware update, specifically version 4A400 . After the update, users like me suffer from these notifications. My guess is that the firmware messed up everything the AirPods Find My should have. After a while, the AirPods stop communicating with your iPhone, making iOS think they are “left behind”.
How to disable these AirPods notifications
Since quite a few people are affected by this bug, I have no doubt that Apple is working on a fix for this issue. However, this fix is not yet available. Perhaps it will appear along with iOS 15.4, which Apple will release next week. If so, we will update this article with appropriate instructions. However, until then, you’d better turn off Find Me to save yourself the daily grief.
To do this, open the Find My app on your iPhone, tap Notify When You’re Left, then tap the switch next to the feature to turn it off. It’s a bummer, because it would be a useful feature to avoid losing your AirPods, but being told your AirPods are “missing” several times a day is no longer so useful.
If you don’t want to resort to disabling this feature just yet, one possible workaround could be to unpair and reset your AirPods with your iPhone. There are no guarantees here, but rebooting the technology often works wonders. It takes no time at all, so if you’d like to try before turning off Notify me when you’re late, check out our guide here .