13.3: Continuity totally broken? [FIXED in 13.3.1]

[3460169]

EDIT: To correct terms. It's not just Handoff that's busted, but most aspects of Continuity on macOS.

Continuity and things related to it seems totally broken and unusable since Ventura 13.3 and iOS / iPadOS 16.4. I have four devices I use daily:

• iPad Pro 11" 2nd gen
• iPhone 11 Pro Max
• M1 Max Mac Studio
• M2 MacBook Air

I cannot get Continuity operations to work between any combination of any of these devices whatsoever, whether that be:

• Universal Control (which I rely heavily on and this is quite crippling to my workflow)
• Universal Copy/Paste
• handing off arbitrary applications (Safari, iMessages, etc)

Did the usual dance of disabling/enabling stuff on all devices, rebooting, etc. Nothing has helped this.

Anyone else seeing the same? Since all devices are affected I suspect this might be somehow related to iCloud but I haven't yet defaulted to logging out and back into iCloud (because of the amount of data involved e.g. my gargantuan photo libraries).

 

[HermanvdB]

I had the same issue. Finally restarting all devices solved it.

 

[3460169]

I had the same issue. Finally restarting all devices solved it.

Nice. I wish it was that easy here. I've restarted the devices a number of time so far, as well as toggling Handoff off/on, but no luck.

 

[3460169]

Not alone with this, per

Universal control not working iPadOS 16.4… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

It seems that handoff is working between i[Pad]OS devices, but it is not working between Macs and anything else (other Macs or i[Pad]OS devices).

I won't be running the macOS 13.4 public beta but will be keen to know if this is addressed there.

 

[Oh-es-Ten]

Damn just realised this is totally busted in 13.3 - tried to use Continuity Camera this morning - completely broken, but then realised that all HandOff and Continuity functions are borked here. Toggling off and on again and rebooting have no effect.

Filed as FB12088408

Just another thing on the ever growing list of macOS Feedback reports being filed - a lot of regressions going on lately. Not good.

 

[pilot76103]

Also, broken here on the 2022 M2 MacBook Pro. No Apple Watch unlock either.

 

[pilot76103]

Signing out and signing back into iCloud on the MacBook resolved the issue.

 

[Oh-es-Ten]

Signing out and signing back into iCloud on the MacBook resolved the issue.

Thanks for the update on that - although this should not never even be a solution in the first place. How could this update get released with this showstopper bug? I am very worried recently about Apple's QA on macOS.

 

[mxrider88]

Same here.

I have been in touch with an Apple engineer for almost 8 months last year to get it to work. Continuity never worked well for me since Yosemite was released. Continuity camera is a feature that I use a lot and over the years I have tried to initialise several times as well. No luck: every time I logged into a second user account on my Mac continuity stopped working and I had to reboot.
They finally got it working on the latest Monterey release before (s)Ventura.

Now with 13.3 it’s all broken again.
Clipboard, Apple Watch unlock, continuity camera, handoff, all gone AGAIN.


I came to one sad and harsh conclusion: they have a bunch of idiots working there.

Every release has more new issues than emojis. It’s a joke.


At the beginning of the year I couldn’t open files with a double click, last year my MacBook Air would shut down like if i removed the battery instead of going in hibernation when running out of power, the experience I am having out of my Apple devices is absolutely crap and the bugs are just enormously ridiculous.
I am not talking about a glitch with an app, I am talking about severe bugs that cause loss of data or impossibly to use macOS. How can macOS not open a file when double clicking on it? How can iCloud not sync so when you edit a file from another device you overwrite all the changes on the file that didn’t sync? How can macOS not hibernate but shut down and lose all open files when running out of battery?
It’s astonishing the LACK of testing.

And if you call them they have zero clue and tell you to reboot or initialise. Or to send a sysdiagnose so they can tell you it’s all good.

My next laptop won’t be running MacOS. That’s for sure.

 

[iphoneuserinyyz]

I have experienced the same issue. I finally got things working again after trying the following things (not sure which one(s) actually fixed it though):
- restart all devices
- turn handoff off and back on
- turn bluetooth off and on

 

[haralds]

I have two stationary Macs (Mac Studio on Ventura and Mac Pro running Monterey with OCLP,) two MacBooks (M1 and Intel) running Ventura, two iPads, and two iPhones.
It has been working pretty flawlessly moving portable devices between two locations. Initially, I had a lot of issues with it.

 

[osplo]

Sometimes the universal clipboard is lost for a while, and I am still on Monterey. Usually all it takes is a reboot.

May the strength of the blutooth / wifi signal between devices be to blame?

 

[tabasko]

Hi,
I have the same issue too.
From another forum I found maybe not a solution but a path to follow.

In my case, if I go to system preferences > bluetooth > I see the other MacOS but it's not connected.
If I try to connect, it connects 2 seconds, not more, than it says disconnected.

Looks like there something disconnecting the bluetooth link.

I share the link I have found : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254756443

 

[3460169]

I have experienced the same issue. I finally got things working again after trying the following things (not sure which one(s) actually fixed it though):
- restart all devices
- turn handoff off and back on
- turn bluetooth off and on

I did the same thing, multiple times on all four of my devices, and also incorporated some KeyChain cleanup as noted in the other thread here. It didn't seem to help initially but I let time elapse a bit, particularly with Handoff completely disabled on all devices. After some time (an hour or so), I rebooted yet again and re-enabled Handoff, Continuity Camera, Universal Control, etc -- and it seems to be working and holding steady once again. How long this will last? Who knows.

 

[Cotton_Candy_Poodle]

I can confirm I am experiencing same issues, both on M1 Air and M1 Pro (Pro being under heavy MDM control, so not much of customized settings that could have messed this).
No Continuity Camera, no AW unlocking, no Handoff with any other device (neither that second Mac, or iPhone or iPad).

What "fixed" it for me was totally logging out of my iCloud on those Macs, which was followed by lovely few hours of getting all my files and photos back to synch from the cloud.

This was working from Thursday until today... when I started up my Pro after the weekend and all of this is dead again.
Continuity/Handoff seems to be fixable now by turning bluetooth off, rebooting, and turning on again. But AW unlock still broken.

So I guess this is my life now. No way I am going thru restoring the account and data again.
Fingers crossed 13.4 will fix this!

 

[mork4]

Turning bluetooth off and on resolved this for me.

 

[tabasko]

It's making me come totally crazy since I did the ventura update.

This morning it still wasn't working, and now, without any action on my part (this morning) ... it's working.

So I don't understand anything anymore.
I'm going to wait for the next update and hope that it will be stable by then.

I don't dare to reboot anymore.......

 

[3460169]

Turning bluetooth off and on resolved this for me.

Hey Mork, how's Mindy doing? ;-)

If this is all it took then this is definitely the easiest approach. Did you do this on all of your devices (macOS and iOS)? And did it resolve all Continuity issues, including Handoff, Camera, Universal Clipboard, Universal Control, Auto Unlock, etc?

 

[tabasko]

Well, it's broken again this morning...

Stupid question, I only have his bluetooth mouse
if I deactivate bluetooth, I reactivate it how?

 

[mxrider88]

Guys we should all send in a bug report…

Maybe they wake up. Maybe…

 

[mork4]

Hey Mork, how's Mindy doing? ;-)

If this is all it took then this is definitely the easiest approach. Did you do this on all of your devices (macOS and iOS)? And did it resolve all Continuity issues, including Handoff, Camera, Universal Clipboard, Universal Control, Auto Unlock, etc?

I don't use Universal Control so I don't know. But Continuity and Universal Clipboard started working immediately. I also toggled handoff setting in Mac settings.

But I didn't use it after that and now it does not work again 😀 so my post wasn't helpfull at all sorry.
//edit:
I've just tried to boot mac (MBP 16 M1 Max) into safe mode and then restart and now it's working. We'll see how long.

 

[Tajrh]

Same issue here, tried updating both to the latest OS version (Ventura 13.3 (22E252)), turning off/on bluetooth & wifi, rebooting, but nothing worked.

I have two macbooks and an iPhone, "copy(mac)/paste(iPhone)" wasn't working either.

Thanks to this thread fixed doing the workaround signing-off/signing-in again on both macbooks.

Once I signed-off from the first macbook I tried "copy(mac)/paste(iPhone)" and viceversa, and worked, so I went to do the same in my second macbook.

It seems it began with an update, it going to be annoying if this workaround is required to do for next OS updates...

 

[3460169]

Well, it's broken again this morning...

Stupid question, I only have his bluetooth mouse
if I deactivate bluetooth, I reactivate it how?

It might suffice to kill the bluetooth daemon but I haven't tried it myself.

From the terminal you'd do something like

sudo killall bluetoothd

 

[mxrider88]

They are all temporary solutions, it brakes within an hour or two again

 

[osplo]

Same issue here, tried updating both to the latest OS version (Ventura 13.3 (22E252)), turning off/on bluetooth & wifi, rebooting, but nothing worked.

I have two macbooks and an iPhone, "copy(mac)/paste(iPhone)" wasn't working either.

Thanks to this thread fixed doing the workaround signing-off/signing-in again on both macbooks.

Once I signed-off from the first macbook I tried "copy(mac)/paste(iPhone)" and viceversa, and worked, so I went to do the same in my second macbook.

It seems it began with an update, it going to be annoying if this workaround is required to do for next OS updates... View attachment 2184308

Is it still working?