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”?
So today, all of a sudden, without me changing anything, my Safari bookmarks started syncing from my Mac Studio (macOS 14.7.2) with my iPhone (iOS 18.3). (I updated to 18.3 when it was released, but the bookmarks didn’t sync until today.) My bookmarks in Safari on my Mac Studio stopped syncing to my MacBook Air (macOS 14.7.2), but rebooting fixed that.
Reading List appears to be syncing properly between Mac Studio, MacBook Air, and iPhone.
However, on my iPad (iPadOS 18.3, also updated same day it was released) is NOT syncing my Safari bookmarks or Reading List, and a restart of iPad didn’t fix it.
My iCloud Tabs are all out of whack:
MBA only shows (1) an outdated selection of Safari tabs open on my Mac Studio, and (2) a selection of 4 out of 20 open tabs on my iPhone, which list includes one new tab I opened today and 3 of the other 19 open tabs. It doesn’t show any tabs from my iPad.
iPhone only shows some outdates tabs from my Mac Studio (different list than what my MBA shows). It doesn’t show any tabs from my MBA or my iPad.
Mac Studio only shows an outdated selection of tabs from my MBA. It doesn’t show any tabs from my iPhone or iPad.
iPad shows outdated tabs from Mac Studio and MBA, but no tabs from iPhone.
So bookmark sync and reading list sync is currently working on 3 of 4 devices. iCloud Tabs are not working on any of my 4 devices.
Hah! So that is what happened. I just opened up Safari and saw that my bookmarks had changed. It does match my iPhone on the same AppleAccount. I wondered what was going on. Looks like Apple turned something on. Maybe part of the calendar thing I hear rumors about.
Reading list syncing works pretty much all the time (except perhaps for page preview icon that sometimes doesn’t show right on Mac, but I don’t care about that).
Bookmark syncing works most of the time (but I don’t change my bookmarks that often either). Every once in a while a bookmark (an apparent dupe) will disappear from Mac Safari and I’ll have to recreate from scratch. It will stick until next time the bug shows up.
Tab syncing is totally broken. As in, as if it were off. Nothing on neither iPhone nor Mac.
I’d say the first two are likely just Mac Safari bugs.
The last one, which actually bothers me most, since it’s probably THE one Continuity feature I’d use most, is completely broken and I’m almost 100% certain it’s server side. It broke from one day to another sometime in the lead-up to iOS 18 / macOS 15. It has remained 100% busted ever since. The last time it broke was in the lead-up to iOS 15 IIRC. I bet it’s related to Apple changing something about iCloud syncing related to something they’re trying to introduce or change in iOS or macOS. I don’t read about it that much so either it only affects few people (and I’m just one of the unlucky few) or nobody uses iCloud tab syncing (which might also explain why Apple does not test for it and thus fails to notice when they break it).
