On an iPhone 17 Pro Max the NFC sweet spot for these frames is on the FRONT of the phone, not the back like in the frame instructions. If you hold the frame up to a light you can see the oval outline of the NFC chip in the frame (at least on the yellow version). Held up to the phone with the back of the frame facing me and the chip pressed against the iPhone SCREEN right below the dynamic island, the photo send worked every time if I held it steady long enough to go through the full uploading, refreshing, offer to share (optional) cycle. If you don’t get the offer to share, the cycle didn’t complete—try again.

You have to follow the instructions. I had a very slim case on my iPhone like paper almost and I didn’t remove it at first. The result was the software thought the frame was updating but it never finished and the frame and it looked broken/buggy. So I sent an upset email saying it’s junk. But I gave it one last ditch effort with the case off and I was blow away seeing it work. I just had to follow the instructions to take the case off my phone and use the top corner opposite the camera against the lower left corner of the frame. Truly impressive tech.

App doesn’t work. It loads an image but then, for some unknown reason, requires you to login. Seems suspicious. If you proceed to attempt to login, their system doesn’t send a code. Perfect way to make a 100% offline transaction require an unnecessary login. The hardware is destined to become useless as the company won’t keep their servers running.

Update: New version of the app that was supposed to fix this worked once and then went right back to the same reading device message. The app begins the transfer with a “Reading Device Information” message but it never completes it. After a few seconds it returns to the photo I’m trying to load without loading it. It did pair with the frame but without completing the entire process it seems non-functional.