100M people have downloaded apps I wrote. I know all about the issues with iCloud.
But as a web service that underpins so much of iOS it is still on a scale and complexity that rivals anything Google and Facebook has. Apple doesn't get enough credit for actually make this work on a daily basis.
Frustrated with just iCloud? No I'd go further. I'm frustrated with the whole iOS platform. It's like writing an app in the 1990s. Sure it works. But it's painful as hell. So much so that I've decided this latest project on iOS was probably my last unless something big changes. And just for the record I have a few flagship apps in the app store with millions of active users and I've worked quite extensively with the platform. So it wasn't a case of trying it and then giving up in frustration. It's more like watching your peers blow past you because your toolset is from yesterday and their's is from tomorrow.
I argue that iCloud is a more robust and coherent offering at this point.
Robust is highly debatable, but the big problem with iCloud is that it's restricted to Apple devices only and is really only a benefit if you live entirely in the Apple ecosystem.
The last few iOS apps I've written for clients haven't used it because we need to support Android and/or non-Mac desktop users as well.
iCloud is impressive and is easily on a scale that most companies will never reach. But Google and Facebook are on an entirely different level. The comparison isn't even close. iCloud isn't a rival. It's more of a distant cousin.
They definitely deserve credit for making it work because even at their scale it's an amazing feat. But there's no comparison to Google or Facebook's scale.
I've started disagreeing with people who complain about Apple doing web services.
Game Center is actually getting pretty solid. So far only played with the turn based, but the API is sexy as hell. And it seems to work fine now that it has been Lettepressed™.
Push Notifications where great from the get go, and it is probably more complex than it looks like.
My experience with iMessage has been _GREAT_.
I use it from iPad, Mac and iPhone. It has worked perfectly fine for me.
They are slowly getting there. I suppose iCloud as a complexity is a pretty hard nut to solve.
Dropbox has had more focus in this area than Apple, give'em some time.
I just wish... I just wish Apple called iCloud beta, and they wouldn't have to suffer so much unnecessary backlash.
I don't know if you can justify statement like that from the proposed evidence.
The App Store and iTunes Store are pretty damned successful services, whether you like them or not.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
Other third party cloud storage providers seem to have no issue developing decent apps and there are APIs that allow them to be integrated in a similar way icloud is. So I’m not sure this is entirely on Apple…
The author is wondering why iCloud Sharing is used by so few developers; I will point out / remind that, in addition to fundamentally being an API whose usage implies "I will never be able to build an Android app which interoperates with this data" (which is already pretty damning for most developers as a door they don't want to permanently close), the first few releases of iCloud were so bad that documents and even entire clients would end up in permanently wedged states that developers could not fix for users and were so bad that at WWDC one year I remember the Apple iCloud person on stage during the "developer state of the union" talk apologizing for iCloud being so broken and begging the audience for another chance.
I think apple is very good at cloud. They don't sell cloud services so comparisons to GCP or AWS is unfair, but their cloud integrations are pretty top notch from my perspective. My phone backs up automatically. My photos are available on all devices with the swipe of a single slider. iCloud is so tightly integrated with their products that a lot of people don't even know they are using it. I think that's a pretty good implementation of cloud.
> I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage.
It's a lot more than that. It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services like Find My iPhone.
There is a lot of stuff Apple is doing with iCloud, but the vast majority of it just silently works, so you aren't even considering that it exists when you talk about iCloud.
I suspect that what you're really trying to say is that Apple has not done much in the arena of building web apps, but even that's not accurate anymore, they have a decent suite of stuff available on icloud.com (including collaborative document editing).
Apple is not the problem. The (horribly proprietary) iCloud is just Apple's solution to the fundamental problem of people collecting data but not being able to manage it.
The article calls out smart devices. I've fantasized about having smart devices of my own, but in my fantasies they answer to me and collect data into my systems. Which means I need to learn a bit of embedded programming and some electrical engineering to build my own, after I've learned how to set up my own servers. I don't see this as viable for normal consumers.
Even I don't manage all of my own information. I switched to Gmail because I just can't keep up with spammers. I have a life.
iCloud is first and foremost just a bit of service glue to make the native email/calendar/etc apps 'work' without sending people to Google or assuming they have a work Exchange account. In that capacity, it's as good as it needs to be. [1]
Similarly the file sharing is just to set a third-party baseline so that file/save sync'ing between Apps on the mobile devices 'works' without sending people off to Dropbox. And in that capacity it also works just fine.
Sure, it resists power-user use. But that's just because, in true Apple fashion, it's not built for it and doesn't care too much about it. But that only makes it 'shit' inasmuch as about 90% of Apple's services are 'shit' and places it distinctly outside the way Jobs defined 'shit'.
[1] Though filtering this crude is cause to reassess that.
From a user perspective, Apple had a rough time with "cloud" for a long time (iTools, .Mac, MobileMe) and the recent era of iCloud feels like they've finally gotten their cloud services in a good direction. It does what I need it to.
I disagree. Web apps are ubiquitous and people know how they work. Google doesn't do keynotes to announce that Gmail autosaves to the cloud... of course it does. Everyone has that expectation of web apps.
Microsoft got a lot of criticism for Windows 7 touch capabilities for taking something designed for mouse input and adding touch on top. It wasn't designed for that. I think that's exactly what Apple is doing here with iCloud. They are taking something that was designed for local access (native applications) and are attempting to shoehorn cloud into it.
iCloud will never work as seamlessly as a web application. Consumers will not be fooled. You can't go to your friends house and edit a document stored in iCloud. You can't pull up a Word document at the library. But you can access your Facebook account. You can open a spreadsheet in Office Web Apps.
Apple is selling iCloud because they have to. Customer perception is not on their side on this one, finally. It's a very tough sell. 1) You have to commit to the complete Apple ecosystem. 2) You have to give up the ability to access your files anywhere. My guess is that most common consumers will not fully embrace iCloud. I don't expect it to be the same type of runaway success that iTunes and iPhone were. Rather it is more likely to be a moderate success: something people use when it's convenient but not something people change their habits to accommodate.
But as a web service that underpins so much of iOS it is still on a scale and complexity that rivals anything Google and Facebook has. Apple doesn't get enough credit for actually make this work on a daily basis.
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