I cannot delete iPhone keyboard shortcuts. They keep restoring.

In the past I've used iPhone Explorer and more recently iMazing. Haven't tried either on iOS 10.

https://imazing.com/

https://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer

You might want to check a new thread about the this problem on iOS 10. It has some new methods to fix this.

Text replacement / keyboard shortcuts gone after iOS 10

If you are still using Mavericks then simply:

1. In Finder navigate to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~TextInput and remove the “Dictionaries” directory
2. Empty Trash
3. Restart your iPhone and then delete unwanted shortcuts from iPhone Settings/General/Keyboard/Shourtcuts

Let me know if it worked.

I tried this and it worked. Three important additions:

1. make sure ALL of your devices that are logged into your account are on and connected to the internet. For me this only worked when both of my computers and my iPad and iPhone were on.
2. add shortcuts slowly -- if I added them too quickly, the syncing would be inconsistent between devices
3. do NOT shut down your iDevices for a while after doing these steps. the first time I tried this, I rebooted my iPhone and was back to where I started, but when I left my iPhone and iPads on for an extended period, the changes finally stuck).

Thanks M.Hayward!!!

OK so this is what I have done to test it with 1 shortcut...

1. Deleted the unwanted zombie shortcut from my iPhone, iPad, Mac and MacBook.
2. Changed the keyboard on my iPhone and iPad from UK to Canada and deleted UK.
3. Rebooted all devices.
4. Changed the keyboard back to UK and deleted Canada.

So far 14/05/15 15:00 the shortcut has not come back. I'll update if it does or does not.

I've been dealing with an AppleCare Senior Advisor, Julius, who is genuinely trying to help. I am trying to keep him on-side, and putting up with the annoyance of repeated re-booting etc, but I have also emailed him my significant concerns about Apple's inability to address this problem seriously. (Some of the steps he gave me are like voodoo, but since we're dealing with zombie shortcuts I think that's appropriate.) His steps, very similar to ewwatson's, are:

1. Go to settings>General> Keyboard> Keyboards Add new, previously-unused keyboard (e.g. “English UK")
2. Go to settings>General> Keyboard> Shortcuts and Delete shortcuts
3. Go to settings>General> Keyboard> Keyboards then Select “Edit" in the top right and Delete currently-used keyboard e.g. "English Australian".
4. Go to settings>General> Keyboard> then Toggle “Predictive" off
5. Go to settings>General> Keyboard> then Toggle “. Shortcut" off
6. Go to settings> iCloud Toggle "iCloud Drive" off
7. Reboot iPhone
8. [repeat on other iDevices, and similar on Macs]
9. Go to settings>General> Keyboard> Keyboards Add “English Australian” keyboard again.
10. Go to settings> iCloud Toggle "iCloud Drive" on.

I performed this on 4 iDevices, deleting about 30 shortcuts individually each time. For each of our 5 Macs, I also turned iCloud off, deleted all text substitutions, then turned iCloud back on.

I have had mixed success. One (but only one) of my old shortcuts came back on my iPhone. This shortcut happens to be one that I want, so that’s okay. After all the work-around stuff listed above, I also re-typed some wanted shortcuts into my iPhone. These have not been synced to other iDevices (2 days later).

On my Mac Mini, one of the unwanted zombie shortcuts has returned. No new shortcuts from the iPhone have appeared here. Two of our other work Macs have no text substitutions at all, not even “On my way!”.

I have emailed the AppleCare advisor describing all this, and asking, "Is it worth your investigating when and how shortcuts/substitutions are synced? I can’t see a pattern myself."

I have another phone conversation booked with Julius this afternoon. I will keep you all posted.

After 3 phone calls over 3 days with an apple tech support rep, we seem to have solved the problem. It's been two days, with multiple iPhone and iPad reboots and so far the zombies have not reappeared. 🙂

We were unable to determine which of these steps was essential so there may actually be an unnecessary step involved, but this combo did work. (I'm 95% I've got the order right. Hopefully someone can confirm for everyone else that this works for them too and it's not a fluke.)

delete all the shortcuts on all of your synced devices (including MacBooks and desktop computers on your iCloud account.)

then do the following on each iDevice

1. go to settings -> general -> keyboard -> keyboards -> add New Keyboard (and any apple keyboard other than the one you usually use for which you speak the language. I used English (Canadian)
2. delete your original English dictionary (or whichever one you were using) [It can't hurt to delete any 3rd party keyboards here and reinstall them later)
3. then you can add it back.
4. delete any iCloud backups for this device. (settings -> iCloud -> storage -> manage storage -> choose device you are on -> delete backup)
5. then do an iCloud back up (settings -> iCloud -> backup -> back up now) - (make sure every app that has data you want to keep is backing up to iCloud before doing this!!!)
6. repeat for other idevices

go to any desktop/laptops synced with iCloud

1. settings -> keyboard -> input sources ->
2. + (add English (Canadian) keyboard)
3. - (English keyboard)
4. + (add) English keyboard
5. - (delete) English (Canadian keyboard)

Now you'll need to reformat your iPhone (AND iPad if you have one - if you only do one of your devices, the shortcuts will return) This isn't an issue as long as you've completely backed up everything you want to save other than it being very time consuming if your internet is slow and you have a lot of data and apps on your phone.

1. go to settings -> general -> reset -> erase all content and settings
2. restore from iCloud back up (the one you created above without the shortcuts) on all your devices

This is time consuming (and I accidentally lost a few photos because my iPhoto app was accidentally not backing up to the iCloud), I had to do it twice to my phone because my iPad was harboring the annoying zombie shortcuts), but like I said, it has worked now for over 24 hours. You may have to redo some of your basic settings, but it was worth it for me.

Best of luck!

Wow. That's shocking but kind of understandable of apple lately.

It's been a year + with no fix. It can join the other unfixed ranks of...

1. iOS wifi synching
2. OSX graphical email signatures bug

And a host of other items I've reported to Apple over the years. Kind of makes you think, why bother.

PS: these forums are hateful to use on iOS devices.

Somewhere I've read that the issue might be related to existing backups of your iDevices; so as a first step it might be a good idea to:

• Delete every single iCloud Backup for any one of your existing iDevices (system prefs > iCloud > Organize/Verwalten > Backups).
• Immediately perform clean new backups on iCloud
• Delete all Backups from iTunes as well
• Perform clean new backups locally in iTunes

In addition, this is what I did to get rid of the issue:

1. Delete all keyboard shortcuts from all your devices (iMac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad etc.)
2. Shut down all your devices
3. Turn devices on again one after the other, checking shortcuts first (Settings > General > Keyboard ...)
4. In case some shortcuts keep returning delete those, shut down and turn on again (in that case, check on every single device again)
5. Don’t enter new shortcuts for a few days, just wait and check periodically
6. If they keep returning, start over with step 4 again, as long as necessary
7. If no zombie shortcut is returning, then start by typing in one first shortcut on your main device and check what’s happening on your other devices. Do this one by one and keep checking.

Annoying, I know, but in my case it worked for some two weeks now. To date, I only have 4 shortcuts on my iMac, and I found that shortcuts are not synced between devices. Now I’m not sure any more if they ever were. Strange.

Lets hope that Apple is really aware of the issue and its causes and will soon be able to fix it reliably. But then … reliability doesn’t seem to be one of Apple main concerns any more … or is it …?

Here is my updated version of what Pagemakers is referring to. It incorporates Chris's, Pagemaker's and my language. It will either help you or confuse you, sorry. We'll see how long it lasts before being edited...

Here is the solution that is time proven for most people and I can verify that it has worked for me and others with no zombies reappearing after many months now:

1. Backup iPhone to iTunes (Do this with a direct connection to your computer, not a backup to iCloud).
2. Install the app iBackupBot on your Mac or PC and open it (the app can be found by googling iCopyBot).
3. Navigate to System files > KeyboardDomain.
4. Delete the "CoreDataUbiquitySupport” folder (it contains the corrupted CloudUserDictionary file(s) that are causing the zombies).
5. I had a couple more keyboard sounding files from 2013 in the KeyboardDomain folder. One was another CloudUserDictionary.sqlite (I forget the other 2). If you find any of those old files from 2013, delete them as well.
6. Exit iBackupBot.
7. Restore the iPhone from the backup created in step 1 that now has the corrupted files deleted.
8. Do the same process for the iPad or any other devices you have other than a Mac.
9. When done reboot both everything.
10. Clean up your shortcuts on all devices including Macs - They may not be the same.
11. I deleted all shortcuts on the Mac as they were stubborn. Don't worry the Mac will begin to sync and restore only your non-zombie shortcuts.
12. Go to bed! Stuff takes a long time to fully sync.
13. Once everything has synced I found it easier to just delete all of my shortcuts and only type in the ones I wanted to keep into one of the devices (and let it sync them to the others) as there were duplicates on various devices including the Mac.

Ok. Here is what I did and it fixed my zombie text replacements.

1. Upgrade all iOS devices to version 9.
2. Delete all text replacements. Yep, all of them. Including other iOS/MAC devices
3. Wait for a single backup cycle
4. Recreate your Text Replacements.
5. You're done.

On a side note, Apple must of done something on the back end with iCloud to fix this issue. When I upgraded all my iOS devices to version 9, they don't come back anymore when I wiped them all out. All I did was wipe them out, waited for a backup cycle, and recreated them.

No need for any special tools or iTunes. It just worked this time (and the dozen other times on iOS 8 didn't).

I can attest to the efficacy of the method described on pages 17/18 by Picinic and others. After more than a year of wrangling with the "zombie shortcuts" problem I had collected and attempted several different solutions. To those who are considering using different methods such as signing in/out of iCloud, turning dictation on/off, applying the various terminal commands, etc., I can assure you of this: They will NOT work long-term.

For some reason I had viewed the difficulty level of implementing this solution as moderately high and avoided it. That was a mistake as it turned out to be incredibly simple, relatively fast and, after about a week of watching and waiting, effective.

To be clear, I have tried EVERY solution. This is the only one that works. And it is far more simple than you might think.

A few notes for those reluctant to dive in:

1. While I'm sure that the recommended application in this approach will work I found that I already owned an application (iMazing, which I highly recommend) had access to the same backup file structure. The interface is excellent and finding the necessary files/folder to delete was simple. I know nothing about iBackupBot/iCopyBot and can't comment on those but can state unequivocally that iMazing is an excellent tool.
2. Restoring the phone from the modified backup was far less painful than I had anticipated. I've done full restores before and expected to have to go through a lot of nuisance factors to restore it - especially not knowing anything about this method - but it turned out to be about a one-hour process for my iPhone 6/64GB with about 120 apps, 7500 songs and 10,000 photos. YMMV but it was pretty quick for me. Note that I did this via a USB/Lightning cable connected to the computer and not wifi.
3. After the full restoration the phone did require me to enter the password for my Apple ID and iCloud but that was all it took. It appeared to me that some things were missing at first glance, in particular my credit cards in ApplePay, but rather than starting to reenter things I decided to wait it out and see if iCloud synced everything. After a few hours absolutely everything came back. Be patient and don't touch anything after the complete restore. It will all come back eventually depending on your contents, phone model, computer, etc.

After following the remainder of the instructions including those to go through all of the shortcuts on each device and clear out the ones (for the umpteenth time) that I wanted to delete, I can report after about five days that the zombies are gone and the syncing of new or modified shortcuts is immediate and flawless.

In short, stop kidding yourself and screwing around with other methods. I avoided using this method because I had convinced myself that it would be difficult. It was not. At all. If you are suffering from the zombie shortcuts problem stop what you're doing, devote an hour or so to this solution and it will be fixed.

My heartfelt thanks to all of the people in this forum who have taken so much of their time to develop a solution that solved an incredibly annoying and productivity-killing problem for me. This is part of what makes the Apple community terrific and I am sincerely appreciative of their time, research, experimentation and careful documentation.

I regret to inform all of those who worked so hard to create what was thought to be the only functional solution that everything has gone completely wonky again in my shortcuts. After following instructions to the letter and seeing immediate improvement it is now a couple or three weeks later and the following symptoms have either returned or occurred:

1. All shortcuts have completely disappeared from my Mac. Yesterday I noticed that about half of them (~50-ish) were gone and I replaced some. This morning they are all completely gone.
2. Shortcuts added to one iOS device are not syncing to my other iOS device or to the Mac.
3. Shortcuts that were deleted on one iOS device reappeared on that device and on the other iOS device.

In short, this solution hasn't worked long-term and I am increasingly convinced that Apples iCloud sync process is FUBAR and useless. It's very disappointing and frustrating. At this juncture I am ready to switch to TextExpander, which is an aftermarket product, but it has way too many limitations (requires you to use their keyboard instead of the standard iOS keyboard, for one thing, also $45 for the Mac) for me to comfortably switch.

If anyone has suggestions as to the cause of, fix for or alternatives to this chronically annoying problem I'd appreciate hearing them.

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!!!!

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.