Force Mac OSX notes to refresh &/or force iOS notes to update FASTER

Question

I just wrote a note on my iPhone. The benefit of using cloud services like Notes is that its supposed to be somewhat concurrent when connected to the internet. My phone & my laptop are connected to the internet. The note is not showing up on OS X Notes. It will eventually though.

Currently there is no pull-to-refresh/update function for the Notes app. This is dumb and should be fixed, but how do I force OSX Notes to fetch &/or force iOS Notes to push FASTER?

Sorry, used git terms. fetch = update (receive), push = update (send)

Answer 1

The process to refresh things on OS X is bird

You can see the log file on OS X to see when changes are pushed to the Mac by Apple's push notification service:

brctl log -w

The same process runs on iOS, but you'll be hard pressed to interact with it unless you jailbreak. Pragmatically, the daemon will notice an interruption of all network activity, so put the iOS device in AirPlane mode for 15 seconds at least and then re-connect to a known good network to let the changes in the local notes database get pushed to the cloud.

You can monitor things and see if the problem is Apple's server side being busy or if it's your network connectivity if needed.

Answer 2

You can also turn off iCloud note syncing in MacOS in system preferences and then turn it back on. It will remove the cloud stored notes from the local copy and then refresh them when you turn it back on. Looks like you can do the same thing on the iOS device too. Pay attention to error messages before you confirm that is what you want. I had problems with notes never showing up on the computer - this seemed to resolve that problem.