Your Mac has two Downloads folders. Here's how I made them one.
macOS keeps a local Downloads folder; iPhone and iPad save into a different one inside iCloud Drive. They never sync. Here's the slightly-cursed symlink trick that unifies them — plus a teardown of the one icon you can't get back: how Desktop & Documents keep their glyph in iCloud, why Downloads can't (a SIP-locked xattr and a two-name allowlist), the one-line fix only Apple can ship — and the sting in the tail: why the symlink quietly sends AirDropped files to /private/tmp, where a nightly cleaner deletes them after three days.
