Cannot Sync Safari Bookmarks from iCloud to iPhone or iPad since 17.4.1

I'm engaged with Apple via their escalations team but I'm at my whit's end here and hope SOMEONE in the ether has an answer or can help.


Background and high level summary: I cannot sync bookmarks from iCloud to my iPad mini 6 nor my iPhone 13 Pro. Both are running 17.4.1. Bookmarks are available and appear to be syncing without issue on my 14" M3 Max MacBook Pro (I can confirm this because if I delete one, it shows up under the Restore Data options on iCloud.com).


The long story: I bought an iPad mini 6 a couple weeks ago. It is the first iPad I've owned since the third version so when I set it up, I used a backup from my iPhone 13 Pro as a starting point. After the iCloud restore, I changed the device's name and it started performing its own backups from that point forward. All seemed well until about a week ago I noticed Safari was missing all of my bookmarks, synced via iCloud from both my 14" M3 Max MacBook Pro and my iPhone. I let it slide because I was busy and figured I would figure it out over the weekend.


Saturday morning rolls around and I cannot figure this out so I contact Apple support. In the normal process of troubleshooting, I signed out of iCloud on my iPhone and signed back in and poof, all of my bookmarks disappeared there as well. Since then I've been passed around by Apple Support, eventually landing with a Senior Level agent who is working with Apple's escalations team. They are suggesting I restore the OS on both devices but I'm in the middle of a big job and simply don't have time to do that. I also find it hard to believe that TWO different devices would exhibit the exact same issue and both would necessitate an OS restore. I did humor them and connect my iPad to my MacBook and reinstalled the 17.4.1 update but that didn't do anything. One thing that is weird to me is that on my iPad, if I try to 'Edit' the bookmarks, I'm met with this message:


Bookmarks are being synced. Please edit bookmarks once syncing has completed.

Strangely, this message even appears if I turn off the iCloud syncing for Safari. No idea where the iPad is trying to sync to in that case but I have had this message appear for 5 days now.


My question: Is anyone else having issues syncing bookmarks to their iPad / iPhone since installing 17.4.1? I'm half tempted to install the beta of 17.5 just to see if it resolves the issue but seeing as I'm in production on a job, I really can't take that chance. Also, I fully understand that this is nothing more than a minor inconvenience, especially since it seems to be syncing all of my browser history and frequently visited sites from all my devices, so I mostly have access to all the sites I go to anyways haha. It's just so weird and seems like such a simple thing that I am OBSESSED with trying to fix it.


iPad mini 6, iPadOS 17

Posted on Apr 17, 2024 03:55 PM

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2 replies

Jun 14, 2024 09:06 AM in response to Voltaic

Same story here … this has been going on for weeks now (or even longer as I am not sure I noticed right away).


I reinstalled both my iPhone and MacBook from scratch (and without restoring from backups). Unfortunately that didn't make any difference whatsoever: bookmarks download fine on macOS Safari but won't ever sync to iOS Safari (with the same "Bookmarks are being synced." message going on for all eternity, it seems).


Toggling Safari sync off and back on in iCloud settings doesn't help either. Depressing :(

Jun 14, 2024 09:12 AM in response to danmoo

I know it may feel helpless but if you haven't already, I would encourage you to engage Apple Support for this issue. I have been talking to them for over 2 months now and they have gathered logs / data from my devices to try and figure out what's happening. Currently the issue is being reviewed by their second tier engineering team.


My hope and fear is that this will magically be resolved with iOS / iPadOS 18 but I'm not willing to try out the betas to see if that works haha

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Cannot Sync Safari Bookmarks from iCloud to iPhone or iPad since 17.4.1

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