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Your Mac has two Downloads folders. Here's how I made them one.

On a Mac, almost every app downloads into ~/Downloads. It’s local — and, surprise, it never syncs to iCloud. The “Desktop & Documents in iCloud” feature only covers Desktop and Documents; Downloads is deliberately left out.

On an iPhone or iPad, Safari saves into a different folder: Downloads inside iCloud Drive (~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Downloads on the Mac). That one syncs everywhere.

So you end up with two folders both called “Downloads,” and the file you grabbed on your phone is nowhere to be found on your Mac. Years of mild, low-grade confusion.

The only real single path

You can’t make ~/Downloads appear on iOS — it simply doesn’t sync. The one folder visible on Mac and iPad and iPhone is the iCloud Drive one. So unifying means making the Mac use that as its Downloads too.

The clean way is a symlink — replace ~/Downloads with a link to the iCloud one. Except it fails:

$ ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Downloads ~/Downloads
# ...rm ~/Downloads → Permission denied

The gotcha: a hidden “deny delete” ACL

~/Downloads is a protected special folder. rm/rmdir returns Permission denied even as the right user, even with sandboxing off. The reason is an access-control entry macOS stamps on it:

$ ls -lde ~/Downloads
 0: group:everyone deny delete

That ACL explicitly forbids deleting the folder. Strip it and the folder becomes replaceable:

# Move whatever's in ~/Downloads into the iCloud folder FIRST.
chmod -N ~/Downloads     # remove the ACL
rmdir   ~/Downloads      # now allowed
ln -s "$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Downloads" ~/Downloads

Now ~/Downloads is the iCloud one. Every Mac download lands in the same place your phone uses, and Finder’s sidebar follows the link automatically.

Bonus: putting the icon back

After the swap, the folder shows up plain — the blue Downloads-with-an-arrow icon is gone. macOS keeps that icon in CoreTypes; re-apply it as a custom folder icon:

ICNS="/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/DownloadsFolder.icns"
DIR="$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Downloads"
osascript -e 'use framework "AppKit"' \
  -e "set i to current application's NSImage's alloc()'s initWithContentsOfFile:\"$ICNS\"" \
  -e "current application's NSWorkspace's sharedWorkspace()'s setIcon:i forFile:\"$DIR\" options:0"
killall Finder

The honest caveats

Convenient, but not free:

  • Everything you download now uploads to iCloud — big installers included. Mind your storage.
  • Files can be evicted to placeholders when space is tight; downloads are throwaway, so a tap re-downloads them. (Unlike a Git repo, where iCloud eviction mid-write genuinely corrupts the .git — a different horror story entirely.)
  • A major macOS update may restore ~/Downloads. If it does, run the three steps again.
  • Fully reversible: delete the symlink, recreate a real folder.

A small thing — but it’s bugged me for years. One path now. 🌊