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

I just spoke with an AppleCare rep about a different issue, and because we were waiting I explained about this zombie shortcuts issue, but while I was showing him (we were screen sharing), I discovered that all the shortcuts that I had tried to delete in the past are now gone. I'm too skeptical to open the champagne right now, but I think that Apple might have finally (quietly) fixed the problem. Yay! 18 months later... no zombie shortcuts.

If you didn't use a third-party solution for the zombie shortcuts AND you have the latest iOS AND you still have zombie shortcuts, please let us know here!

Wow. 43 pages and this is STILL going on.

I've now discovered that iOS to iOS synching of shortcuts works fine fine me. However, iOS to OS X or OS X to OS X doesn't work at all.

I've logged out and in to iCloud on my Macs. What else can I do?

I dont know if you ever got a decent answer.

The easy way to add/remove stuff without getting all technical is to go to

you Settings:

then General:

then Keyboard:

And last

TEXT REPLACEMENT.

Here you will be able to edit/delete any words added.

Hope this helps!

oh yeah, I've completely left this & any troubleshooting for an entire 6 months.  Decided to peek in to see any new devs & fixes... no such "good" news.

As I've closed down ALL aspects of my life [publishing/promotion/etc] on which I was counting on this to work in that time, do I even bother to try again???

I have these problem for a long time and I did post something in this thread for awhile back.  I believe I have fixed the problem (for months already) and I want to share it here.

1. Goto Settings | General | Keyboards | Text Relacement

2. Instead of deleting the zombie shortcuts, try to rename the shortcut.  For example, "omw"->"on my way" changes to "zzz" -> "on my way".  Save it.

3. Wait for a few hours.  Sometimes, you will see both omw and zzz in the shortcuts.  Don't panic.  Just delete them one each time and wait for a few hours.

4. If the rename/delete method works, you can repeat the same steps.

I've found that my bad shortcuts were resolved through a combination of (1) past troubleshooting similar to as described by iceycake above on each device signed into iCloud, (2) recent iOS and OS X updates.

For me this problem is closed.

Hi, I saw the fix you referenced on page 7 and the many people who attempted to use it. But I cannot seem to find the name of the application that allows you to go in to the iTunes backup and delete the icloud shortcuts. Can you help advise me on some apps available? I searched for some myself, but none of them work on my computer or are not made to accomplish this specific task!

Please help. I have full restored my iphone 4S multiple times as well as factory reset- the shortcuts actually follow me from phone to phone....  It doesn't matter how much data I lose, the shortcuts return... which makes sense because the apple ID and icloud account are still the same.

Now I have purchased a new phone and it's time to end this once and for all! I hope you can help me find a program that works. For now my phone is backed up onto a core 2 duo intel iMac that runs OS 10.6.8.

Thank you.

I'll trade you. I got pranked too and various words like "the, what, love, and" all correct to obscenities.

Hey guys after updating to iOS 9, then no issue during 9.1, 9.2, etc. then again during iOS 10, I have now had the opposite problem:

ALL of my shortcuts disappear.

Relevant thread here: Text replacement / keyboard shortcuts gone after iOS 10

Could this work:

Signing out of iCloud and Drive and rebooting the phone resulted in the "omw" shortcut coming back and the deleting of five "essential" shortcuts I had made in the interim. It eventually restored my five "new" shortcuts that I had created after this problem began, but not the other 995 or so shortcuts I had made prior to upgrading to iOS 10.

So that says to me that somehow upgrading just wiped them off of iCloud for some reason. It's also VERY clear that the issue is iCloud-based, not locally backed up or anything based as initially suggested.

Sure would love a way to get back my 1,000 or so shortcuts so I don't have to manually enter them again, but if it restored five new ones, that's probably a good indication that the old ones are gone.

This happened to me when I moved to iOS 9 as well. But not on incremental updates like 9.1, 9.2, etc. And then again on 10.

I'm hesitant to redo all my shortcuts only to have them disappear when I get my new iPhone 7 next week though...so I'd love it if someone could solve this problem.

I wonder if I could trigger the transfer from iCloud to the phone using an old backup. There is a file called CloudUserDictionary.sqlite located under iPhone/System Files/Keyboard Domain/CoreData/Mobile/User Dictionary/D5555ds;aljkfd;lfj/store