Cant find crossplay friends

We both have tried everything, we messed with our account settings on EA and everything. Neither of us can find each other when we go ingame on Apex, and search for each other in the "add friends" thing. We have tried restarting the game and searching each other up with every EA id and username we can. The only thing that I can think of is that I don't have Xbox live gold anymore, but he still does, and I am sure that I do not need it to play with him since I am on steam. Help!