I cannot delete iPhone keyboard shortcuts. They keep restoring.

Alas, there's no foolproof way to directly access The ever-revered Engineers. Apparently, they live on a sort of Apple Mt. Olympus, and only speak to the Oracles, i.e., Senior Techs, and even then, their responses are not counted in minutes, but in days -- if you are lucky. And you'll have a **** of a time getting to a Senior Tech in the first place. Keep pushing with front-end support to "escalate" your issue. Be pushy.

If anyone else knows some secret I've not discovered or employed in this sort of communications, please chime in.

Sigh...

HAHAHHAHA, I think they live across the way from the Google Gods on their equivalent promotory. I bet the two are like lawyers out at the bars & golf junkets laughing about us mere mortals waging war down in the trenches below!!!

SO here's what I recall doing to get my Mac to sync. Nothing, except that I did delete all of my shortcuts on my Mac and then re-entered the ones I wanted to keep. Those started to show up on my iPhone and iPad And the syncing resumed In both directions. And yes you do need to make sure all of your backups are clean including your iCloud backups. So after cleaning up your iTunes backups on your computer, be sure to delete your old iCloud backups and get a fresh start or you'll just reinfect your devices. You can always check by using the ibackupbot program again to check that your backups are still clean.

My experience:

Apple engineers will not speak to customers.

Apple senior advisors are not able to speak to Apple engineers. Apple senior advisors are only able to send emails to Apple engineers. If Apple engineers choose not to respond in an appropriate length of time, Apple chooses to do nothing.

I think the earnest first-level advisors and the earnest senior advisors are genuinely trying to be helpful, but when there is a long-term, complex bug, Apple's business structure and support structure make them appear patronising. I have regularly provided feedback to Apple that, especially for long-term, complex problems, the company needs to respond much better to customers. The fact that engineers cannot directly communicate with customers makes sense if the engineer is not trained in customer service. The fact that senior advisors cannot telephone an engineer makes no sense to me, and dramatically reduces the degree of effective communication between users and designers. It's fine to have a senior advisor act as the communication conduit between users and engineers/designers, but it does NOT make sense to limit this communication to emails in which the engineers are supposed to respond in 48 hours, but are not obliged to respond in any particular timeframe.

(Typed on an iPhone. Apologies for typos.)

I seem unable to get off my soapbox.

If my staff made promises to clients that were regularly not fulfilled (e.g. "It will be fixed with the next update." or "The engineers will get back to you within 48 hours.", then I would performance manage those staff. (Is that an international term? I mean: I would warn the staff that they need to improve their work in order to keep working for me.)

Peter Oram1 wrote:

I seem unable to get off my soapbox.

If my staff made promises to clients that were regularly not fulfilled (e.g. "It will be fixed with the next update." or "The engineers will get back to you within 48 hours.", then I would performance manage those staff. (Is that an international term? I mean: I would warn the staff that they need to improve their work in order to keep working for me.)

I think that assumption is that everybody knows everything, just like some advisors some engineers do not know everything. Don't forget that there are also developers who actually fix a bug, cause engineers are just making sure that system works the way it suppose to - so if there is a bug, they report and wait for systems to be updated for how long - depending on priority or how many people affected? I feedbacked apple more then ten times, only two times it was

implemented and guess how long? Don't forget that engineers probably do not work weekends or holidays, response time plus time to familiarize with a problem and so on.

@ Picknic

I think Hans does not have a Mac. His experience may be completely different...

grrrr... just did a bunch of testing [and I only added a clean MCP to my mix 3 days ago.... the iOS backups were all cleaned, not a zombie problem any more, just sync not working by any of the two method that I have seen work] ... no desired results and I just lost all the steps I had written down in the process.

**** this garbage.

oh well... maybe some miracle of modern technology will bring syncing back. cheers

I have a stupid working theory about ghosts, that I am not ready to share and according to that theory, if you didn't have a Mac synced with iphone/ipad, when you had IOS 7 on one of the devices, there is no sync of shortcuts on IOS 8. Unless Apple brings it back on 9, or unless you already have folder in the cloud, that from what I understood, Apple removed for you. I do not want to be a bearer of bad news, so will be happy if it works for you.

Have been good 2 weeks. Deleted the offending file in my iTunes backup as per picnick. Then deleted my cloud back up.

DId you follow those steps and they still came back? Is sad I've been a huge Apple advocate, starting to wish I'd have followed my son and got the Nexus 6!

pagemakers4:

I just updated to iOS9. I deleted the unwanted Text Replacements. I then opened Preferences on one of my Macs, and literally watched the unwanted Text Replacements disappear in front of my eyes! Not what I expected. Now to wait a few months to see if they stay gone.

I just added a brand new Text Replacement on my iPhone, and again watched it change on OS X in front of my eyes! That's the kind of syncing behaviour I expect!

(And congratulations to Apple for making the name for these things consistent in iOS and OS X! No longer does "shortcut" mean different things in iOS and OS X.)

Doesn't that mean that you two (Peter and Pagemakers) are having the opposite results?

Trial: I've held off on 9 on my phone, but did set it up on the iPad. Will try to delete the zombies there, and see what it does to the others.

This is making no sense. I just did what I said I would (bumped to iOS9 on the iPad, etc.) I deleted everything but one zombie as a marker, and touched nothing else on either my Air or my phone. But, um, now some have dropped off my Air, but not all. They've all stayed on the phone.

And just above, three fully different scenarios. WTH?

And how have they made the names consistent? There's still something called SHORTCUTS (toggle on/off, on the list at the bottom of KEYBOARD) in iOS9, which I presume turns OFF the TEXT REPLACEMENT function. Or is it for something else? Did I miss something?

crmac wrote:

There's still something called SHORTCUTS (toggle on/off, on the list at the bottom of KEYBOARD) in iOS9, which I presume turns OFF the TEXT REPLACEMENT function. Or is it for something else? Did I miss something?

Description of what that switch does is right below the switch. If you double click keyboard space bar inside of text it creates period symbol and space.

For me two devices one on 9 one is 8 sync happens within minutes, but can be sped up by restart of device that need to be updated. Not enough time to verify zombies.

Too fast, they are back.

yes, the problem is there and I got no exact solution for you to remove them.

BUT what I do is, think more shortcut / text replacement, instead of creating them, edit from the old one. Because you can edit and replace them! =)

Hope it helps.