[Fixed] MacOS Universal Clipboard is not working (Monterey)

Tanin Srivaraphong
2 min readApr 30, 2022
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

TL; DR

  • ❌ NOT SAFE for non-geek user
  • ❌ NOT ALWAYS WORKING
  • Make sure you’re logged in to your ✅ same iCloud account on every single device that needs to use the Universal Clipboard feature
  • Go to Terminal, and type the following command
  • (Optional) To delete existing.
defaults delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist ClipboardSharingEnabled
  • ✅ To enable clipboard sharing features
defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist ClipboardSharingEnabled 1

5. Done. Enjoy

Long story that I have to spend a lot of time investigating the problem by doing the several user troubleshooting ways to solve this problem

Option #1

  • Using the same iCloud account on every device
  • Restart Macs
  • Restart iOS devices
  • Turn on/off Bluetooth
  • Turn on/off Wifi
  • Disable and Enable the handoff feature on both macOS and iOS devices
  • etc.

Above item, I did it already but never thrived. So I’m trying to figure out the most geek way to enable this feature.

Thx to one of the community contributions from the following thread

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253274114

😘 Thanks, msimpson81 that giving the geek way to solve this issue.

Final Output of com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist file.

No need to be the same as mine

Option #2

Most of the case I do not really need this to make it works

Ref: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/universal-clipboard-not-working-mac-iphone-iphone-mac.2231304/?post=28871143#post-28871143

  1. Disable Handoff in System Prefs
  2. Terminal:
    rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist
  3. Keychain Access -> delete “handoff-own-encryption-key” (this is the local device’s handoff key)
  4. Restart in Safe Mode
  5. System Prefs -> Enable Handoff.
  6. Reboot.
  7. Universal Clipboard working correctly!

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