Yesterday, I mentioned I could probably replace TextExpander with the built-in Mac and iOS text replacements, given that I generally don’t use the more advanced features of TextExpander, anyway.
So this morning, I fired up my MacBook, opened System Preferences and TextExpander side by side, and created shortcuts for my most-commonly used TextExpander snippets in the built-in system. There were a few shortcuts I had created that could fill in forms, or put the cursor in the middle of the text replacement (two features that the built-in replacements can’t do) but I thought there was a good chance I’d get over that minor inconvenience quickly.
Then, a few hours later, I took a look at my iPhone’s text replacements. Given that these are supposed to sync over iCloud, I expected to see all my new replacements right there on my phone.[1]
Not quite.
Oddly, about half of them had synced, while the other half were missing. One duplicate that I had deleted was still there. As of this writing, the missing ones are still missing. On my home iMac, none of the new shortcuts have appeared. My iPad Air 2 seems to have one or two of them. My iPad Pro has none.
Maybe Smile wasn’t crazy to make sync the tentpole feature of its new subscription service, after all.
- Okay, I’m lying. I fully expected the iCloud sync to be a disaster, since text replacements have never synced properly for me on any of my devices. But I thought maybe there was a minute chance Apple had addressed this in the most recent updates. Nope. ↩
