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

TThey are now back on ALL devices even family sharing

Delete them from all the devices again. I don't think they'll come again. I believe what happens is that once you delete the "bad" files from the local/iTunes backup, and restore the devices, the zombie shortcuts are (possibly) also located in iCloud. Thus when you reconnect your devices to iCloud they come back. BUT when you delete them this time, they actually get deleted from the iCloud AND they (the zombies) are no longer in that file on your phone. Try it.

And if you do don't reboot your phone or create and delete stuff.  Leave it until tomorrow. Have patience.

I gotta say, I just don't get it. I'm back at home, slow day at work, checking the backups. Not a single device has a corrupted backup with more than two folders.

So if it was that way, why would rebooting matter?

If this is all a localized issue, and you delete the localized issue, and restore from the fixed backup...then you delete shortcuts. No reason it should come back.

So you're saying delete the shortcuts again and wait and see if they reappear?

Why the **** is there not a program or a way to just delete the keyboard entries. I'd GLADLY start from scratch if it meant it would work thereafter. It's also ******** that you can only delete one at a time. There's no mass select, there's not option to torpedo the whole set together, you name it.

So the main device in which all of the shortcuts have been created. No corrupted backup anymore, just verified. You're saying, delete the zombie shortcuts and wait a few days to see if they return?

Also if it has nothing to do with iCloud and iCloud drive then you shouldn't need to delete shortcuts on all devices because it shouldn't have an effect. It should all be local problems? Also, if I ensure none has a corrupted backup and delete the shortcut from the main device, should that not update on the subsequent devices anyhow, thereby eliminating the need to delete them on each device individually?

Slow day at work and I'm leaving town tomorrow, so thought I'd chime in again.  I TOTALLY understand your frustration and I was there too!  If I worked for Apple I'd run to "whoever" and demand a fix for this, because I'm convinced it would be very simple.  However, I don't work for Apple and we're all trying to help you get you past this as we did.  I agree with both k.alexander and pagemakers4 that you need patience.  It is a local problem on each device, but as k.alexander pointed out, iCloud syncs your shortcuts between all devices so you need to keep deleting the zombies for awhile until they're gone on all devices.  They should stop reappearing if you have clean devices and it sounds like you do.  BUT if you have some zombies on one device or on iCloud they will appear on the others until you finally delete them all.  They will stop reappearing when you're done.  I know this is a royal pain in the XXX, but it will work as it has worked for everyone so far.  I'll keep monitoring this site while I'm out of town because I want to see you get this resolved.  It's a pain to try and type into this thread from an iPad or iPhone though!  Good luck, take a deep breath and relax... 

Ironic that Apple can't even get their website to work with their mobile devices.

Matthew110607

I hear ya, this is frustrating. I resisted going through this process primarily because doing a restore sounded like a pain in the rear; especially considering that I essentially never connect my iDevices to my Mac any more and all my backups are through iCloud. Surprisingly, after having done an encripted sync, and allowed the sync to copy all my apps to iTunes, the restore was fairly quick and the only thing I had to re-setup were my CCs in Passbook.

Having said that, my devices include an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac Mini. The problem mostly appeared on my iPhone. I rarely, if ever recall seeing the offending shortcut(s)--I only had a few that I didn't like, on my iPad. They would show up from time to time on my Mac.

I followed the steps from page 17. I only did it on my iPhone. I did not do anything to my iPad; although I did create an iTunes backup of the iPad, and then opened it up with that app to see if there were files in the directory from 2013 (as there were on the iPhone)--there were not, so I did not restore the iPad.

As I said, I followed the steps and restored the iPhone. The shortcuts did appear at some point shortly thereafter on my Mac, and I don't recall if they appeared on my iPad. I deleted them once from all the devices they were on. This was Monday night last week. I've rebooted soft and hard, all the devices many times since, and keep checking. The zombies have not come back. The syncing of the shortcuts from the iPhone to the iPad is almost instanteneous. It's much slower the other way around. And its really hit or miss to sync to/from the Mac Mini, and it took a long time (days) for the Mac to reflect any syncing changes. But I'm not concerned about that. I just needed those few stupid zombies to go away.    

Hello, All:

Well, I'm back. Lots of new noise here in recent days, so I figured I'd join the chorus...

I still haven't tried any of the fixes we've unearthed here as a hive. Stubborn, I guess, or worried that if I diddle around with those nasty, disease-infected THIRD PARTIES that Apple will disown me when I have to show up at tech support for something else -- which I just had to do today.

I was having this fluky thing happening where Mail kept recovering messages onto my Air (the Air itself, as in ON MY MAC), and because it started to do this with both inbound and outbound messages, I was left wondering whether anything was ever sent, blah, blah, blah. I'd move or delete the messages -- and they would come back. I'd delete the RECOVER folder -- and it would come back. Sound familiar, anyone? Apple does Groundhog Day.

Thus, I had to spend nearly two hours on the phone today with Apple, passing through no fewer than three levels of expertise before Ryan, a Senior Advisor (he helps the old people, I guess), was able to dig into the Library files for my Mail, where he nuked a repository of old stuff. For now (just hours later) it seems to have solve the problem. That problem.

But, in the process of the various calls, I felt I needed to explain to each tech why they were being faced with someone who was already fried, impatient, and sick to death of the bits of rotten Apple that keep coming back from the compost heap. At the Ryan level, he (naturally; it's the Apple Way) felt he might be able to have an easy solution. Also naturally, he pretty much went through some of the things that we Hivers have already tried, and tried again. So we skipped those, thank you. He asked for and I sent him the thread. We went out to Safari and into my account through iCloud itself where my interface showed that I have ZERO (0) stored in there. His point of access, however, which differs from what we lowly Users can see of our own records, showed one errant text file (about 22k, I think). Ah-ha! Ah-ha?....

So, Ryan had me turn off iCloud Drive on all three of my Apple devices (Air, iPhone, iPad), reasoning that this is where the problem lies buried. Because I'm not now using iCloud Drive to store anything, nor had I been doing so intentionally, it's a non-issue. That's all we did was OFF iCloud Drive. Then I wiped out all the shortcuts, first on the Air, then on the iPhone. By the time I got to the iPad, they'd cleaned themselves out. Clean and clear.

With great initiative and much to his credit (the red-shirted techs that Tim Cooke beams down first to the alien planet of Support do their best, but um, what always happens to the guys in those red uniforms?), Ryan even went off after our call and dug further. He called me back and wants to set me into Test Mode (again!) so that The Engineers can go into my User backups and clean out the whole library. I told him that in the last round with Tech this is exactly what The Engineers told me (through the front-end red-shirt tech) they could or would not do. Ryan seems to have changed the course or history and has permission on this now, but I have asked that we hold on Test Mode until see if with iCloud Drive off the shortcut list stays clean, and if the fix on the original issue with Mail messages being recovered onto the Air sticks as well.

Now, several hours later, it's, well, weird. The stupid, native On my way! shortcut (which I can't even type now in its shortcut form because the Air overrides with the long form) has come back on the Air, but the iPad and iPhone are clean. None of which makes any sense, even relative to all the other craaap we've all experienced.

Will report back.

Sigh...

Matthew

And I agree about your comment that these forums don't play well with iOS devices!!

They are the worst piece of forum software I ever visit. Terrible on iOS devices.

The good news is that we have found the solution.  We just need APPLE to fix it for everyone so we aren't spending all of our time explaining it to each person as they discover this discussion thread.  In the meantime, I'm on a personal mission to make sure Matthew is rid of this problem on his devices because I know how UNBELIEVABLY FRUSTRATING this is.  Hopefully, there isn't some anomaly with his particular devices, but I'm sure the solution will work with a little more patience.  I wasn't concerned with the third party software as I tested it for malware and I use third party software everyday.  It has worked well for me and others in solving this problem and has had no repercussions.  I'm zombie shortcut free now and so thankful for Chris posting the solution with the few tweaks I had to make for my extra file(s).

Apple Tech Support suggested this:

Delete the shortcuts you need to delete, then immediately after, go to settings > iCloud > backup and select the option to backup now (make sure you are connected to Wi-Fi of course)

Yeah I wouldn't trust an Apple tech to save his or her life.

I can guarantee that solution will not work.

This method ended up not seeming as though it worked, still had them come back every once in a while, so I kept deleting them from iPad and iPhone but would still return.  I updated both to 8.4 so we'll see what happens. 

Sadly 8.4 won't fix anything for you.