iCloud Sync finishing quickly, but not actually in sync

[jufineath]

I am having a weird issue that I think began with iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. On each device (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) the read state within the iCloud folder is completely different.

Marking an article read on any one device does not appear to ever sync to the other devices. It is almost as if each device now has its own iCloud storage, splintered from around the time of the OS upgrade. Oddly (and contrary to that theory) renaming one of the folders syncs correctly to the other devices immediately (though the unread counts remain different).

This doesn't appear to be the "long sync times" issue. The progress bar completes (and "Updated Just Now" appears) within a few seconds. In total I have (depending on which device you ask) 200-400 unread articles across ~30 feeds.

It doesn't appear to be feed specific. DaringFireball, Six Colors, Kottke, TechDirt, NYT (and more) all exhibit this symptom.

I haven't yet gone nuclear, so feel free to reach out if there's anything I can do to help narrow this down. And apologies if it's a known issue, I wasn't able to find anything similar.

[dmshaw]

I don't have a proper fix, but I can say that I had the same problem and deleting and re-adding the iCloud account got things back into sync for me.

[jufineath]

For what it's worth, performing that on my iPad mini seems to have mostly gotten sync working (at least for recent messages) across my devices. Thank you!

I haven't performed that activity on anything else yet so I still have some minimal sync funkiness if anyone has an opportunity to use it for investigation.