Wont let my ps5 friend join iPad word(and other way around)

Hello. I have an issue that has been persistent for around a year now. On my Xbox 1. I bought Minecraft, and for my iPad . All of a sudden. I get "unable to locate world. Unable to connect to host, unable to connect to world" Every time I want to join my friends world. He has multiplayer enabled yet we both get these alerts. Even on a completely different device this happens. I deleted the game, deleted the cache, restarted the game, restarted my console, and it still will not work. I paid for this game so it needs to be fixed. We even tried the wither flower method the community promised would work yet it didn’t. IT IS NOT AN INTERNET ISSUE. We can join the public worlds just fine just not each other’s world so it cannot be an internet thing. We need a solid fix. None of this internet bs is helping.