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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

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31–40 of 192 posts

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#31
I am one of those developers who don't jump on the bandwagon right away. Experience has taught me to be very cautious. It also comes from doing a ton of work on mission-critical systems where you don't do stuff like install the latest software updates without massive testing on off-line systems.

Yes, sometimes I miss out on really neat developments. iCloud is one of those cases where I am glad for being a slow adopter. My mental red flags went up as soon as iCloud came out. Not one of my apps uses it.

On the end-user front iCloud is also an absolute mess. I probably have a dozen i-devices on the same account (testing, etc.). Crap appears and disappears from devices seemingly at random. The worst of it was what is happening with my wive's iPhone and mined. We share an iPad at home. Now contacts are getting deleted from her phone and mine at random and so are notes. It's at the point where she is not using notes any more because --her words-- they disappear within a hour or two of writing them.

Of course, turning off iCloud is the solution. The problem is that this isn't as simple as throwing the switch. If you turn off iCloud on your device it might actually delete things that it shoved into the iCloud service. And then it deletes the info from your other devices. And it does this in some amazingly weird ways. Without telling you what it is about to delete.

For example, I have never explicitly stored contact information on iCloud. Never. I type new or updated contact information into the phone. That's where it belongs. In fact, I never even use my iPad for this. Yet, some contact information for some strange fucking reason is sent over to iCloud. The first time I turned off iCloud piles of contact data evaporated from my phone. I had to turn the damn thing on again to get it back.

I haven't had the time to research how to fully disable iCloud on ALL of my devices while, at the same time, keeping or merging the state of my data on that particular device. As a developer I managed to avoid iCloud. As a user I was not that fortunate, I succumbed to the new shinny thing on the shelf. Now I want nothing to do with it. Thank you Apple.

Any ideas on how to do this?

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#32
post #8

It's interesting how the iCloud branding plays into this. Because Apple includes so many services under the umbrella term iCloud, it can lead to a very different impression of the service between the users and the developers. All the talk about "iCloud is broken" is about one specific part, Core Data syncing. The rest, like online backup and document syncing and calendars, seems to work most of the time. I actually s…

The rest, like online backup and document syncing and calendars, seems to work most of the time.

Those 3 things are broken as well. Lost all my data twice.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#34
post #22

I feel like I'm the only person that has had zero trouble with iCloud. My phone backs up to it regularly (without my having to do anything whatsoever) and I've transferred my entire phone settings (and my wife's) more than once to brand new devices via iCloud. In my experience, it truly does "just work".

Right. So as a consumer, it's mostly painless. For developers, it's fundamentally broken as potatolicious describes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454729

Gotcha. I guess I just don't see what all the fuss is since it works flawlessly for me.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it prompts you to log in, it will pull up your appleID for you, but it gets it wrong. It will pull up some random other appleID...sometimes an old one you created for iTunes using a hotmail account you haven't checked since 2004, but sometimes a completely random other person's appleID. The authentication is unpredictable too...my wife has successfully signed on to her current account using an old password and s…

How is that even possible? What could be the possible rationale for keeping old passwords stored? Crazy.

Normally it would to be prevent users from reusing their most recent N passwords, for security. I don't believe Apple does that anywhere, though.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#36

I've worked with iCloud in conjunction with Core Data. It's as broken as the article describes, and in fact has gotten worse over time. No one really fully knows WTF is going with iCloud - documentation is basically nonexistent, support unavailable, implementation broken in trivial ways, and error messages inscrutable. I was at an Mac/iOS conference recently where the Core Data iCloud talk morphed from a standard tal…

I just hope people can differentiate between Core Data and iCloud from both your comment and the article.Core Data isn't broken. It might be somewhat magical, but it's not broken.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#37

I've worked with iCloud in conjunction with Core Data. It's as broken as the article describes, and in fact has gotten worse over time. No one really fully knows WTF is going with iCloud - documentation is basically nonexistent, support unavailable, implementation broken in trivial ways, and error messages inscrutable. I was at an Mac/iOS conference recently where the Core Data iCloud talk morphed from a standard tal…

From what I've heard iCloud is primarily Java (and some C++)

Not that I'm blaming the technology specifically, but my impression is that Apple is being naive.

Of course you can build with Java, but if you knew better and have the resources Apple has, you would be aiming somewhere else. Google can do this because the infrastructure is there.

Not in the case of Apple

And as this shows, the concept itself of how the service works is broken. This is smelling of 'walled garden fundamentalism' + 'technical ineptitude'

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#38
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.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#39
I have been surprised at the relative lack of interest from developers about first class syncing support, when mobile blew up I expected a flurry if libraries and tools that I could use to have my app work offline and sync data wherever I am.

Sometime last year I gave up waiting and started working on PouchDB (http://pouchdb.com/), its based on CouchDB's syncing model (and syncs with CouchDB) and works anywhere that Javascript runs (the browser + node), there is an iOS / OSX equivalent (https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-iOS).

PouchDB isnt quite ready for production but its getting close, I would love any feedback on it, although I expect most people commenting on this would be more interested in TouchDB

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#40
post #30

It might be nice if Apple's legendary attention to detail extended beyond the logo. [1] 1 - http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/24/the-icloud-logo-and-the-golde...

And that's the problem in a nutshell. If it's consumer-facing it's years in development and polished. If it's for us lowly developers, well don't hold your breath.
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