iOS and macOS Text Replacement Gaining CloudKit Syncing Soon

There’s been quite a stir over the last week regarding an area of the Apple cloud ecosystem where syncing has remained unreliable for years. Brian Stucki wrote a detailed post on the matter, which John Gruber linked to with echoing sentiments. Today, however, Gruber followed up on his post with an exciting update:

Good news related to yesterday’s item regarding the fact that text replacement shortcuts have never synced reliably between Macs or iOS devices: an Apple spokesperson emailed me to say they checked with the team, and an update that moves text replacement syncing to CloudKit should be rolling out to iOS 11 and MacOS 10.13 High Sierra users in the “next month or so”.

I use text replacement every day across my iOS devices, and haven’t dealt with syncing issues myself, but it’s great to hear that this long-standing problem should soon be put to rest for everyone else. Recent history shows that once a cloud product moves to CloudKit, syncing issues disappear almost entirely – hopefully that will be the case here as well.