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

Cool! You found the Secret key! ★★★★★

I thought I replied to this.?? Must not have stuck. Hope it works!  Thanks!!

I had dictation off already on mine but I turned it on before doing the steps you listed and I want to turn it back off, will that change anything?

I did exactly that, on both of my iOS devices. Now, all of the old shortcuts are actually coming back faster.

disreguard in the last post made by me have found they are still returning after a week

another epic failure

disregard last post shortcuts have returned after a week

The engineers need to get their **** together lol, I had this same issue in November, and then it was gone until maybe January so they obviously did something to fix it and undid it in some update in the last month or so. Such a frustrating issue.. I'm not going to waste my time and restore it when hopefully they'll correct it in the next update.. I've spoken to at least 4 different senior advisors since November, emailing/calling back and fourth. I even put my account into troubleshooting mode two different times. It doesn't look like there's a way around this. I have like 50 that I need to delete each time. So annoying

It appears there's only 2 options. 1. Restore as new. That fixes the problem. It deletes all shortcuts and you start over fresh. 2. Delete the unwanted shortcuts, then immediately do an iCloud back up. This works until the phone is rebooted. Then they come back and you have to do this № 2. again. I would suggest submitting feedback on this issue. The more complaints the better.

Feedback Here:  http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Actually, that's not the case. They come back all the time with a restart but they also come back even if I don't do that.

Mine stayed gone until a restart, reset or reboot was done. But I had to do the iCloud back up immediately, or they would come back. IDK! Apple just needs to fix this. It doesn't seem like it would be difficult to fix.

After a hard reboot, they would come back immediately. I just tried the "reset keyboard dictionary" option under the reset section and it seems to have at least temporarily prevented their return. I'll post again if they come back.

Same exact problem!!!!! Kids put nasty shortcuts on a year ago as a joke and I CAN NOT get rid of them. If "let's have sex" sneaks into another text, I swear to God!!!!!!! I am desperate for a fix!

The only thing that works is to restore your phone as new. It's a pain, but the only way.

In response to iBarrett:

"1) In terminal:

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

I've done this and get the shortcut on my desktop. Which is kinda cool. But when I click on any of the folders I get a white finder window with this image inside instead of seeing any subfolders or files.

Do you know why and what I can do to see what's inside? And more importantly, if I delete files in this view, are they permentatly deleted elsewhere? I have the same zombie shortcut issue as everyone else on here. So I'd love to delete shortcuts. But I am also curious if I could use this to finally clean up my actual dictionary (used when typing in imessage for instance), to delete words that never should have been saved in the first place from typos.

Thanks!

Timothy

To view folders/files in the "real iCloud drive" you have to change the view settings in the Finder window to List view (or one of the other view options -- not on my Macright now so I can't remember which one it's called). Hopefully that'll help.

And like many people have said, the only method that seems to work is deleting all those in iCloud drive and then erase all content & settings on your iOS device(s) and start from scratch. Annoying as ****, but in all these iOS soft updates and still no fix... I don't think there will ever be one.