I have four Apple devices, all signed in with the same Apple ID, all with Safari enabled under iCloud settings:
Mac Studio M2 Max (Sonoma 14.7.2)
MacBook Air M2 (Sonoma 14.7.2)
iPhone (iOS 18.2.1)
iPad (iPadOS 18.2.1)
When I make changes in my Safari desktop bookmarks on either of my Macs, the change almost immediately syncs to the other Mac. But somehow my Safari bookmarks and Reading List on my iPhone and iPad are not syncing with each other or with Safari desktop on my Macs. I’ve tried turning off Safari under iCloud settings, force quitting Safari, rebooting, and turning Safari back on under iCloud settings–all to no avail. I do NOT want to try anything drastic like signing out of iCloud altogether, resetting all settings, etc.
Is this a bug in iOS/iPadOS 18.2.1?
Has anyone else had this problem?
Any ideas for how to fix it?
(Background: Somehow my bookmarks had previously gotten corrupted, possibly due to a sync issue with Brave via BookMacster, but I’m not sure. So I deleted all of my bookmarks in Safari desktop and re-created them. Everything is working as expected between my Macs, and Safari ↔ BookMacster ↔ Brave sync is working again too.)
I have a very similar setup and I am seeing very similar things. This is with Macs running Sequoia (all flavors 15.0, 15.1, 15.2) and iPhone running 18.2 (although it also happened with 18.1 and 18.0)
My bookmarks tend to get out of sync every once in a while on a specific device. What happens is that a bookmark “duplicate” disappears on one device, but just on that one device. I then recreate it locally and things proceed to work well again for a couple weeks until it happens again. It’s a duplicate bookmark in the sense that it has the same name and points to the same site as a couple others (use it for demarcation in favorites bar). Apparently iCloud or Safari thinks it is empowered to clear out what it perceives as needless duplicates without running it by me first. But it only does so on one device at a time. ???
More annoying, because it happens ALL THE TIME, to me is the loss of iCloud Tab functionality. This has been a recurring problem over the years, but somehow it always ended eventually getting restored again when Apple fixed their server side thingamajigs. But not with macOS 15 and iOS 18. My Tabs have not synced properly since the late betas. I was able to get it to work again briefly after turning off Safari iCloud syncing on both a Mac and an iPhone and then turning both back on again. But only hours later tab syncing was again broken. And remains so.
My Mac presently has 5 tabs open yet my iPhone shows none in its iCloud Tabs section. My iPhone has two Safari tabs open, yet my Mac Safari’s iCloud Tab button reveals zero tabs.
This is not rocket surgery. How can something that in principle is not very complicated and Apple touts as a basic cloud feature of its own closed and supposedly beneficial “ecosystem” remain broken for such a long time? How can it remain broken for such a long time with neither a fix from Apple nor a “we know it’s busted and we’re working on it so please bear with us”?