Q: I cannot delete iPhone keyboard shortcuts.  They keep restoring.

Same problem here.

The irony is that, when iOS 8 came out, I was among those complaining that shortcuts kept disappearing.

     Keyboard Shortcuts iOS 8

Now they won't disappear ... ever ... even when deleted.

It's a syncing issue with iCloud "Dictionaries" which is a hidden folder in the iCloud Drive folder. If you're a dev or comfortable using Terminal, the following command will place a "real iCloud drive" folder on your desktop which will allow you to see ALL the items in iCloud Drive. Inside this folder is the folder called "Settings" and then "Dictionaries". You can then see other nested folders from each device ID (Macs, iOS) that write to iCloud.

This is not a fix but here's the steps to view those:

1) In terminal:

ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/ ~/Desktop/Real\ iCloud\ Drive

2) You will now have an alias on your desktop to the iCloud Folder (you must choose to view it in a Finder window as list view)

Drill down until you find a file with the extension .cdt

3) Duplicate that file onto your desktop and CHANGE the extension to .zip and unzip it.

4) ADD the extension .plist to the end of the UNIX file that was unzipped and then you can view it in text edit app and see the shortcuts info.

Again, not fixing anything, but trying to narrow it down and hope that some developer/programmer out there with better knowledge than mine can help!

Just a reminder to everyone to report the issue to Apple and go to Genius Bar if you have the time and call Apple Support:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html

So has anyone figured anything out yet? I have a stupid shortcut a friend of mine put on that changes "now" to "meow" and it WILL NOT GO AWAY! Its infuriating when I'm trying to send out texts to colleagues/employees and end up missing a "meow" here and there. Someone please HELLLPP!!!!

So has anyone figured anything out yet? I have a stupid shortcut a friend of mine put on that changes "now" to "meow" and it WILL NOT GO AWAY! Its infuriating when I'm trying to send out texts to colleagues/employees and end up missing a "meow" here and there. Someone please HELLLPP!!!!

Confirmed NO FIX IN iOS 8.1.3

Still crashes in settings app and theres no way to delete/edit any shortcuts. This is insanity.

Still no fixes..

my shortcut down going to double and tripple.. all my deleted shortcut were restored back..

I Have this issue as well. Surely Apple is aware of it! It's extremely annoying when using the stock keyboard to have email addresses pop up constantly. I've tried all I know to do. Has anyone tried 1. Toggle off iCloud Drive 2. signing out of iCloud. 3. Reboot 4. Sign back in to iCloud 5. Toggle iCloud Drive back on.??

Apple needs to fix this.

Hello everybody! As iBarrett mentioned it is a problem with the sync of iCloud dictionaries after update to iCloud Drive.

Here is the fix for repairing shortcuts syncing. Works if you already have updated to iCloud Drive.

WARNING, this command will force remove all user dictionaries from iCloud!!!

• In terminal run:
  rm -rf ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~TextInput/Dictionaries
• Restart one of your devices (iPhone or iPad)
• Everything from your device should now upload to iCloud
• Remove recurring or unwanted entries

All changes should now sync to all your devices (iPad, iPhone and Mac)

Not everyone has a computer. Apple still needs to fix this. I have them deleted for now. But they'll probably come back somehow.

Sorry, but that does nothing to remedy this for me. I had already tried that -- deleting those dictionaries from iCloud. Unfortunately all it does is repopulate iCloud with the same shortcuts that I can still not access to edit or delete as the Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts still results in a crash on all my iOS devices. So, there must be a way for Apple to "reset" and delete the shortcuts that I cannot get rid of in iCloud, but no one at AppleCare or Genius bar seems to know how to do that.

They have "elevated" my case several times but I have never received a followup call so it's very frustrating.

Mine are deleted for now. I deleted those I don't want, then immediately backed up to iCloud while they were still deleted. I'm sure something will trigger them showing back up again. What, I don't know. But at least they're gone for now. Have been for several hours. They'll probably return with the next hard reset or back up. We'll see.

You are absolutely right! Once you have deleted all the dictionaries from iCloud they will upload from your devices again. That's what I have stated in step 3.

iBarrett wrote:
 
I can still not access to edit or delete as the Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts still results in a crash on all my iOS devices.

If I understood correctly your issue is that you are unable to access shortcuts settings on your iOS device to delete them because it crashes? If so, this is other question.

I am totally agree that there should be a simple way to reset these iCloud dictionaries!

@romanaleksandrov Yes, that's correct... there's no way for me to edit or delete the shortcuts because they just re-upload again and I can't access them in settings as it crashes, but as you said that is a different specific issue that some people are experiencing in addition to this issue so it seems to be tied together. Hope your fix works for everyone that can access the settings app -- at least that will help some people. Thanks to everyone keeping the conversation alive in hopes that Apple will take notice of the issue!

I experienced problems in the past trying to get my iOS and Mac OS text shortcuts to sync properly. Eventually I deleted them all and switched to using Text Expander, but periodically the text shortcuts would return like zombies from the dead. I eventually managed to kill them all off, save for on my iPhone, where they would inevitably return, which was very very annoying.

I'm told that this is a problem caused by one or more Core Data sync bugs and there's nothing to be done about it until Apple fixes those bugs.

However, if you're like me and you just want to get rid of all your text shortcuts for good, I found a hacky solution that's held for two days now (which is a long time in my experience with this bug, so fingers crossed…)

I used the method from @iBarrett's post (Nov 25, 2014 11:16 AM) and learned it's directly related to information from @romanaleksandrov's post (Feb 12, 2015 1:30 PM), so thanks to them for giving me the map that opened the way for my hack.

Based on @iBarrett's post, I navigated to the ~/Desktop/Real\ iCloud\ Drive directory using the Terminal and found a folder there called com~apple~TextInput/; it was into this folder that my zombie text shortcuts were resurrecting themselves via the *.cdt files that @iBarrett mentioned. Since I wanted them gone for good, I simply deleted that directory with rm -rf com~apple~TextInput/ and then very quickly created an empty file with that same name and no privileges:

touch com~apple~TextInput ; chmod 0000 com~apple~TextInput

With the zombies' graveyard now already "occupied" by nothing, they can't come back from whatever plane they're currently hanging around to mess up my life. So far, so good.

I don't know if this is a good interim solution to your problems with misbehaving iOS/Mac OS text shortcuts in the event that you want to continue using that part of the Apple cloud magic. But if you just want to move on or move away from them, it seems to work.