iPhone, so many wifi points, mine won't appear in the list!

This is an incredibly obnoxious bug in iOS (and macOS) wifi network selection: basically the neighboring networks, which you have no interest in, fill up the wifi list so you don't see your own network which you actually want to connect to!

I've seen many unhelpful non-solutions to this problem such as "turn off automatic connection" or "change the wifi network priority list" or "reset your network preferences" or etc.. None of these "solutions" fixes the root problem which is that the iPhone simply doesn't display all of the networks and frequently picks the wrong ones to display.

Because Apple's wifi control panel on iOS (and the wifi menu on macOS) truncates the list of available wifi networks to a small list, it means that if there are dozens of networks in the area it is basically a crap shoot as to whether your desired network will show up. The noise drowns out the signal. You can't make the list longer. You can't blacklist networks you never want to see. You can't adjust it to "show all" or "show my preferred networks at the top of the list" or some other (currently nonexistent) setting in order to actually see your network. Instead you just have to keep refreshing and hope it shows up. This is a serious and annoying bug that Apple needs to fix, because there really is no consistent and reliable workaround as of iOS 12.1 at least.

If you can see the connection OK from your Mac, then try elevating its priority - which you can't do from the phone, but is simple on the Mac.

System Prefs > Network > WiFi > Advanced...

You can drag access points into a preferred order. If you move your WiFi to the top of the list, this should then sync to your iPhone & it ought to then choose that as its preferred connection.

Have you tried disabling the Ask to join networks function?

To do this:

• Go to Settings
• Tap on Wi-Fi
• Toggle the Ask to Join Networks option off
• Exit Settings
• Connect to your USB drive (you may need to do this manually)

Hopefully you should find that in future your USB drive will appear as a known network, while all the other neighbourhood ones won't.