Brave sync on iOS is completely broken and has been for many months! - plus other bugs with sync on iOS too. (iOS) If you have iOS please read!

I spoke to a few Brave staff on Twitter but haven’t heard back for a while.
Last time they were trying to replicate it, but it is easy to replicate. My steps never fail!

If you are on iOS you will have this too. Please reply and let us know. If this gets some heat maybe they will fix it soon as it has been months for me now!

If you are on Twitter, you can retweet my post or do one similar. I tagged some staff that I know help.

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I don’t know about anyone else and at least for today I removed my sync chain and started a new one and everything seems to be working! Will it last who knows I will find out tomorrow.

i’ve done that Heather

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the problem is that it doesn’t last synced for longer than a few days

I have issue #3 where the sync freezes after scanning the QR code using my iPhone XR.
I’ve tried multiple time and nothing happens. If I have to enter 20 words to sync, given the problems listed here, then it’s not worth it.
Please fix this.

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Hello, all! I wanted to update this thread after doing a few hours of testing on my end. I was able to confirm that sync didn’t appear to work in some cases, but worked most of the time as I would expect. Allow me to elaborate.

To conduct my testing I setup Brave Nightly (v1.1.36.23) on my Windows 10 PC, and Brave (v1.32, 21.10.13.18) on my iPad. Both instances were removed from any existing sync chains beforehand.

I created a new sync chain from the iOS device, and manually entered the code words into my desktop device, thus connecting the two via a novel, common chain. Upon doing this, bookmarks were exchanged between devices. As @ukheather stated, everything appears to work when you first establish the new chain.

What Worked

I primarily tested bookmark-syncing, which I found to work flawlessly in my experience. In fact, not only did I run into 0 issues syncing bookmarks between devices, I was impressed with how quickly changes were propagated.

I created bookmarks from desktop, and saw them appear on iOS. I created bookmarks from iOS, and saw them appear on desktop. I deleted bookmarks on both ends, and saw them be removed almost immediately from the other device. I also did edits (changing a title, or moving from one folder to another) and saw those applied within seconds to the other device.

What Didn’t Work (or didn’t work well)

After confirming that bookmarks were working reliably for me, I enabled history-sync on both devices and began testing that scenario. I would type a URL into desktop, and wait for it to appear in Brave’s history on iOS. I would also type a URL into iOS, and wait for it to appear in Brave’s history on desktop. This scenario worked sometimes, but not always, and usually only in one direction (sending desktop URLs to iOS).

When I first enabled History Sync on iOS, recently-visited domains were synced to the desktop device. Viewing the updated history on desktop requires a manual refresh of the desktop history page, which is not the case for iOS.

As @ukheather described in earlier posts, there were indeed some issues after the initial sync. I couldn’t get many history items (i.e. typed URLs) to sync from iOS to desktop. Desktop to iOS worked very reliably, but mobile-history rarely appeared in the history of the desktop instance of Brave (out of half a dozen or so URLs tested, 1 or 2 sync’d to desktop).

It’s unclear at this time where the problem lies; it could be an issue with iOS failing to recognize the opportunity to sync history from time to time. I am already speaking with the iOS team about investigating their possibility further.

Other Notes

My testing involved proxying all iOS network activity through the desktop device where Brave Nightly was running. Traffic for both Brave Nightly on Windows, and Brave on iOS, passed through the Web Proxy Debugger Fiddler Classic (by Telerik).

Although I had trouble syncing history (again, bookmarks worked very reliably) from iOS to desktop, both browser instances remained in good communication with the Sync endpoint (sync-v2.brave.com at the time of this writing). I never noticed any interruptions in communication with the Sync server itself.

Conclusion

I’m convinced there is indeed an issue here which prevents, at the very least, history from being synced from iOS to desktop (or presumably any other device on the sync chain). I’m going to spend more time looking into this, and hope to have more updates to share in the near future.

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Yes - it won’t sync history across my devices either

During my testing, history from my PC synced to my iOS device without any issue. Do you observe the same behavior?

At lease for me if you create a new sync chain it will work the 1st day and then after that nothing it will not work at all. And in fact when starting a new chain the qc code will not work and just freezes. Only thing that does is the key. I have a Mac with iOS devices

the main issue Sampson is at first sync, all is ok. its after a day or so which things start to un-sync. so your first day is going to be ok its going to be over time which things start to not sync

Can you elaborate on your experience, please?

Do you have a desktop (Windows or macOS?) on the same sync-chain, and if so what are the Sync settings you have enabled on both the desktop and your iOS device? In my tests, I had Bookmarks and History enabled on both devices.

Do you see desktop bookmarks and history syncing through to iOS, but nothing from iOS making its way to desktop?

I have the up to date deb version of Brave on the lastest version of linux mint all boxes are ticked, plus Brave on two Android 11 devices all boxes ticked and Brave on iPadOS (lastest update) both history and bookmarks are ticked.
All on the same sync chain.
Linux and Android devices sync flawlessly. But Brave on iPadOS looses sync after twenty four hours or so

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Can you confirm the following scenario for me?

  1. Ensure that Bookmark-sync is enabled on desktop and iOS.
  2. Navigate to brave.com on desktop and bookmark (place bookmark within Bookmarks directory) the site.
  3. Wait up to 5 minutes and see if the bookmark appears on iOS.

One of your colleagues asked for us to do the same thing in another thread:

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I have done that about 70-90 times so far (no joke)
It doesn’t work
iOS loses sync after gaining it. So if you add it to the chain, it will lose sync after that first sync.
It loses sync as soon as it had synced. I found it loses sync instantly so no bookmarks added AFTER the sync are ever synced.
Never used to happen either, only started happening a couple of months ago.

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it was after the latest update i think

I agree. I followed all of Brave’s instructions to sync my Mac desktop, iPad, and iPhone. The chain holds for a day, and then it breaks by itself. I like this browser, but I may have to go back to Firefox or another browser that allows you to sync bookmarks without this kind of flaw.

Bit late but retweeted Heather.

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Hi Sampson - realise you need to follow a process but as others have mentioned this has all been followed before, and issues can take 24 hours or so to appear. Have you read through all the posts from the last 2 months since Heather created the thread? Including some of mine (quoted below). I am an ex-IT Professional so consider myself at least vaguely competent with what info I provide - also a bit concerned for example you have ‘tested’ by having Traffic for both Brave Nightly on Windows, and Brave on iOS, passed through the Web Proxy Debugger Fiddler Classic (by Telerik) as this clearly isn’t the normal real world scenario the rest of us are in, for most of us we wont be passing our traffic through any proxies or debugging software - I realise this may help identify an (internal) issue but it won’t show if there is one for those of us in the real world environment (i.e. something is breaking the sync comms in real world environments).

Note also my posts quoted below where I have clearly established there is no obvious bug with an older version of Brave running on my older iOS device (iPad Mini 2) and yet there is clearly an issue with my newer device (iPhone 12 Pro Max with latest iOS and Brave). So clearly something is different between them whether its the Brave version (post 1.24) or a side effect of Brave interacting with the iOS version on each of the devices, its clearly not iOS per se, but an issue with the newer version(s) of Brave and/or iOS.

And this is obviously without even looking into the app freezing on the QR Code Camera Screen issue.

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my sync is back working after the 1.34 update :grinning: