Copy and paste from iPhone to MacOS not working

Handoff (the name of the mechanism for transferring state data between your Mac an iPhone) doesn't rely solely on Bluetooth.

Both devices have to be logged in on the same iCloud account, and Handoff needs to be enabled.

So first check that you're logged into iCloud on both devices.

The on the Mac, check System Preferences -> General, and make sure that the 'Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices' is enabled.

On the iPhone, check Settings -> General -> AirPlay & Handoff to make sure it's enabled there.

The terminal commands didn't work for me on my Mac M1 Pro running Sonoma 14. However, there was an Apple recommendation to check the HANDOFF setting on the Mac and the iPhone. In my case, the Mac -> Settings -> General -> Airdrop and Handoff -> Allow Handoff was On, but not on my iPhone. Once both settings were enabled on both devices, copy and paste on Safari worked immediately. Good luck.

I had this problem too, Monterey 12.7.3 to iOS/iPadOS 17.3.1

Since it worked between iPhone and iPad, but not between Mac and either of those, the problem was on the Mac.

Nothing mentioned helped. But a safe mode reboot, login, wait for it to settle down (use Activity Monitor if in doubt), logout, and reboot (normally) took care of it.

Safe mode evidently cleans up some unspecified things (caches, maybe more).

To solve it this morning without Terminal, I tried copying a piece of text from my Mac, which then pasted fine on iPhone. Trying the reverse, I copied a photo from iPhone and pasted it to my Mac.

For whatever reason, this seems to have reset the clipboard, and got things going again. Hats off to labachev for the inspiration of the clipboard being the culprit, not my Handoff settings which I haven't changed in years.

I kept having this issue between my macbook Pro & iPhone, and realized that simply closing the AirDrop window (or just switching to another directory in finder) fixed the copy/paste issue.

So the issue is that whenever the iPhone appears on the AirDrop window, the copy/paste feature seems to be frozen

Hope this helps other people!

I know this was posted a year ago but I just had this issue and easily fixed it.

1st) Make sure your WiFi, Bluetooth and AirDrop is on for both devices.

2nd) On your MacBook open "System Settings", click the "General" tab, then select the "AirDrop & Handoff" tab. Find where it says "Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices" and make sure that toggle is on.

2nd) On your iPhone/iPad open "Settings", click "General", select "AirPlay & Handoff" and make sure the "Handoff" toggle is switched on.

This worked for me without having to reset, reboot, jumpstart or whatever other people recommended doing, which only just confused to me.

I was having the same problem. I turned off handoff in settings and turned it back on and it worked. Hope that helps anyone else having problems.

Something to consider:

I was trying to use Google Translate on my iPhone to translate from Latin to English and then using translation on my Mac, and it didn't work. I tried all the suggestions in here and they were, frankly, a waste of time.

I found out that what I was doing "wrong" was using Google's copy button instead of the iPhone's routine. Google's button kept saying "text copied", but who knows where to. Using the iPhone's routine worked flawlessly. So, the source of the problem might be the App you are using and not the iOS.

Camelot thanks for the suggestion.

I turned off handoff on both devices and turned them back on and it worked.

I tried some of the suggestions here, e.g. labachev's terminal commands, disabling and enabling Airplane mode, as well as the Handsoff option but to no avail.

However, I tried going to Messages > Settings > iMessage and clicking on Sync Now and it suddenly worked. I can now copy from my iphone to my Mac. Hope this helps somebody.

iOS 17.4.1 & Mac Sonoma 14.4.1

I was also having this issue. Simple fix for me was to log out of my iCloud and log back in. Copy and paste now working.

After making sure I was on the same wifi and the handoffs were enabled and all that, I realised I could paste Mac to Phone but not in the reverse. I tried some of the above except the Terminal option but a restart of my phone took care of it. Posting in case it might be that simple for someone else.

Thanks a lot, this fixed the issues for me (Sonoma 14.3).

I just had to switch my phone to airplane mode and back to make it work.

Confirmed! Turning on Airplane mode on my iPhone 15 Pro Max for a few seconds and then turning it back off did the trick. Didn't have to run the terminal commands listed above. Thanks for this!

Two things helped for me: one time a safe mode boot cleaned up whatever needed cleaning.

Another time, pasting from Mac to iPhone had old data. As it happened, I had a screen sharing session into that Mac from another Mac. Screen sharing tends to fiddle with copy/paste, so that it can work across the systems involved. Disconnecting the remote session had the copy/paste between Mac and iPhone again picking up current data.