SOLVED: MacOS Clipboard Sharing Handoff not working

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Acheron2016 Author

Level 1

18 points

SOLVED: MacOS Clipboard Sharing Handoff not working

For three months I have had a problem open with Apple Support that Clipboard handoff from/to MacOS and any ixxOS devices did not work. On three different occasions traces were taken and sent off to Engineering. MANY things were tried, most of which left my iCloud account in disarray and I spent hours recovering. And no joke the very first support technician had me go into recovery mode and enter some undocumented command that wiped out my MacOS installation; I had to restore from TimeMachine!

Needless to say this has been a long term problem where thus far the diagnostics were far worse than the problem. But today on a whim I asked Grok if there was some software that could be blocking handoff. It of course misunderstood and listed lots of ways I could try to break handoff with firewalls etc. But then towards the end it gave the golden goose of an answer.

defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist ClipboardSharingEnabled

This SHOULD respond with 1 to show ClipboardSharing is enabled. It did NOT! It responded with 0. So a quick execution of:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist ClipboardSharingEnabled -bool true

And clipboard sharing is fully functional again.

Hopefully someone else with broken handoff will see this post and save months of heartache and maybe even a TimeMachine restore.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.1

Posted on Dec 8, 2025 7:14 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 8, 2025 10:12 AM in response to Acheron2016

Interesting.

what I see when I enter your default read command posted above —on an Intel Machine on Tahoe macOS 26.1

Macbook-Pro ~ % defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist ClipboardSharingEnabled

2025-12-08 09:52:04.218 defaults[60112:2036432]

The domain/default pair of (/Users/REDACTED/Library/Preferences/com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd.plist, ClipboardSharingEnabled) does not exist

Macbook-Pro ~ %

Let me be clear however— I have no issue with handoff or clipboard

so I"m not sure what to make of your insight or resolve, but sounds like you got it working non-the-less.

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Answer 2

Acheron2016 Author

Level 1

18 points

Dec 8, 2025 11:56 AM in response to leroydouglas

That is a surprising. Do you have Handoff turned on in "System Settings/AirDrop & Handoff/Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices"? My guess is maybe you don't. (EDIT: I see you just said it works for you. So I got nothing! All I can say is this flag works as a binary switch for me controlling whether handoff works fine or not at all.)

When I open the useractiveyd.plist file in Xcode it has 3 keys:

kRemotePasteboardBlobName

kLocalPasteboardBlobName

ClipboardSharingEnabled

The first two are UUID filenames deep inside Library/Group Containers. The last is the boolean flag. It seems these files are where pasteboard (clipboard for everyone else) objects are shuttled back and forth from iCloud. Which brings up another point, this sharing absolutely requires your devices are all signed in to the same iCloud account.

I kept my Intel MacBook because it was worth so little as a trade in. I really only boot it up when a new OS drops. I did fire it up and I have the same file structure on it as well. So this isn't an Apple Silicone vs Intel thing.

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Answer 3

John Galt

Level 10

155,240 points

Dec 8, 2025 10:13 AM in response to leroydouglas

Same here. It implies something else had been misconfigured. Of course it's disappointing Apple wasn't able to determine what that may have been.

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