There has been a lot of press the last few weeks over iCloud’s lackluster text replacement feature. Brian Stucki wrote an excellent post documenting just how bad the service is.

I have to admit that I forgot iCloud even provided text replacement services. For years I would eagerly test out iCloud text replacement when there was a new version of iOS, but after a while I gave up. I could never get it to work reliably. Indeed, I wasted so much time trying to get it to work that I ultimately gave up and stopped trying.

I left my old job a few years ago, and iCloud text replacement still tries to occasionally drop in that old phone number even though I’ve fixed that entry repeatedly.

I think that is one of the challenges of iCloud. It covers so many different services that it’s easy to lose one or two in the mix, especially when it’s one that doesn’t work reliably. That has certainly been the case with the text replacement feature.

The good news is that Apple is now moving text replacement onto the CloudKit API, which is much more reliable and should, hopefully, solve the problem once and for all. Indeed, Apple representatives told John Gruber that this rollout would happen “in the next month or so“. I sure hope so.