I had to upgrade recently from OSX 10.11.6 to OSX 10.13.3 to be able to run the latest Xcode. The upgrade has broken a few things and also brought a bunch of new system stuff — I found out about a dozen of new daemons because my Little Snitch was popping an alert quite often after the upgrade.
There were some questionable daemons trying to access the internets, for example keyboardservicesd
— based on the name only, why would a keyboard-related daemon connect online? I didn’t want to get into the details so I just blocked almost all of them. But why stop at blocking the access? A better way is to actually stop these muddy services, that’s what I did and ended up seeing this “iCloud Drive may not work properly. Please check the iCloud preference pane.” alert every time I opened the Open/Save File dialog in any application — it showed up once per app launch.
That is very annoying, especially since I don’t care about this iCloud thing at all and I would gladly remove/disable it altogether in an official way, but guess what, Apple doesn’t provide that way (at least, I couldn’t find anything online). I was then searching for this message to figure out what is possible to do to get rid of it — nope, nothing. I had to brush up on my little reverse engineering skills to deal with it myself. The step-by-step story (and guide to repeat it) is below.