Periodically¹ Numbers will get “stuck” trying to sync to iCloud changes I’ve just made on my iPhone. Numbers will claim that the spreadsheet is updating, or needs to be updated, but no changes will ever reach iCloud and the “needs update” UI will never go away. This used to be a frequent issue,² and over time I tried all sorts of things to resolve the problem: quitting Numbers, making another local change, making a change on iCloud, waiting a while, toggling Airplane mode on and off to “kill” networking, turning iCloud off in the Numbers settings, deleting the spreadsheet (both on the phone and also on iCloud), and other things I can no longer remember. Some combination of tinkering always seemed to fix things, but it was never anything easy—always a tangled combination of things—and The Internet™ didn’t seem to have any relevant information when I searched.

Eventually I discovered a reliable, repeatable, simple solution: turn the iPhone off and back on again,³ and the next time I open Numbers, it will happily finish syncing my changes from the iPhone to iCloud.

Hopefully the All-Seeing Internet Search Engines™ will index this post and offer it up to others who might also be searching for a solution.

Has anyone out there already filed a Radar on the “stuck” iCloud sync process? I’ll eventually get around to filing it myself.

        

¹ It’s difficult to tell what might be triggering the “stuck” sync, but my best guess based on when and where it happens to me is a marginal network connection or network transition.

http://www.ardisson.org/afkar/2015/09/02/escaping-a-stuck-ios-numbers-icloud-sync/