Yea that’s actually the most annoying thing for me too, I would rather use it with gdrive or Dropbox instead of iCloud (which is prone to a ton of issues). I had to do some hacky things to get it to work the way I wanted tbh.
I’ve given up on using iCloud Drive, despite having Apple everything, because I find the sync so unreliable and undebuggable. I never had any issues like this with OneDrive or Dropbox.
I'm with you. I have a total love-hate relationship with it. I love how it keeps me in sync across all my iStuff (4 total) but when something goes wrong, even as a developer, I have no clue what it's trying to tell me. And when it comes to email I've really seen absolutely no use for it beyond keeping my Google, Exchange, and other calendars/email accounts in sync. And no, I don't want to save anything to iCloud, I'd prefer it on my hard drive until iCloud gives me the same level of convenience in managing my files as Dropbox thank you very much.
Once they started changing their product like this, I moved all of my personal stuff over to iCloud Drive. I was already paying for it anyway. It’s maybe a bit pokey, but I never have problems with it.
It's going to take a long time before I can ever trust iCloud with my files again. Such an absolutely trash experience compared to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
I don’t know that these issues are super frequent, but the fact iCloud is directly integrated seamlessly into the user directory and across devices without futzing is nice. Dropbox I found to be relative expensive and not well integrated. As an extension of the OS, when enabled I cloud manages a lot of the user home directory without a “drop box” folder. This is important especially for people who aren’t particularly interested in computers and just want them to work. The fact there’s a special place for loading files across devices and backup is cognitive load 99% of the universe doesn’t want. Even myself who is fine with the cognitive load found that the lack of fuss with moving things around and just always working is convenient enough that despite having at various times Dropbox / box / others that I just used iCloud. Finally there just isn’t any material advantage to Dropbox over iCloud that I could find. While things delaying their sync or whatever might be annoying occasionally, you can unstick it with small gestures like creating a directory and deleting it, but you can also achieve this by simply waiting longer - which is what most people do. In the very rare case that I am trying to tightly synchronize files between devices and it’s stuck, it’s mildly annoying, but the continuous advantage of the tight and seamless integration with the user directory is a constant advantage. I suspect almost all the times it’s stuck I didn’t even realize it
Agreed. Working on multiple machines and files not friendly to g docs, makes dropbox indispensable. When I upgraded to Lion and iOS5, I didn't even think about using iCloud. iTunes integration w/ iCloud may change that but I doubt it.
I’m happy with it in general, but it feels like iCloud has a higher sync latency than some other services like OneDrive. And because it is a black box, there is no way to force sync it.
I would drop a file for example to sync up to my old MacBook that acts as a CNC controller, walk over and OneDrive would reliably be there. iCloud however…
Having worked on an iCloud using iOS app... it's hugely buggy. I've yet to see as problematic API as iCloud is on iOS 10. Files failing to sync, a lot of users don't even get the app folder, randomly files won't sync (forever) and more. All of that is wrapped into opaque service, which doesn't really tell you what it's doing and what went wrong.
Might be they're all messy like that... but iCloud didn't really seem like a reliable service and it wasn't close to reliability of Dropbox :/
BTW, what happened to Dropbox becoming an iCloud alternative?
I rarely use Dropbox to sync app data because it's always fully visible in Dropbox and messes up my directory structure. (Although chflags hidden usually helps …)
iCloud should be wonderful except it sometimes refuses to download or upload a file for hours. I’ll want to transfer something from my phone to my computer so I’ll move it to iCloud in the Files app and then it just won’t upload.
I had lots of issues using Day One with iCloud. I have the Mac app as well as the iPhone app, but they just wouldn't sync up correctly. Fortunately, after moving to Dropbox syncing everything cleaned up and I've not had a problem since.
I honestly think it's some of the worst UI on planet Earth. Every time I use one of these it's impossible to do what I want to do.
Try signing out of one icloud account on a Mac laptop and signing into a different one. You need to open several apps, dig through various random disconnected menu options, click past several warnings, and wait a long long time sometimes (often with no visual feedback that the task you started is done).
And I feel like most things in Apple ecosystem are like this.
iOS doesn't even expose a file system to the users, so so so many of my family members on iOS have no idea where to go once they download a document or audio file or video file to then play it back. The worst part about this is that there is a Files app, but you can't save files you download to any folder that app exposes. Why? Who knows??
Sorry for getting heated, but I've just had such frustrating experiences with the platform. Maybe someone can give some examples of the amazing UX they have then I'll see more clearly why people like it. My instant reaction is to remember all my wasted time trying to do simple tasks with it
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