I don't mean to be flip but how could you think a company that has to take down their store to change the product inventory would be a good bet to build solid web services?
Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
51–60 of 192 posts
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#52It'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…
Loosely, there are two iClouds, one for Apple apps and another that is 3rd-party developer facing. This article sums it up fairly well: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/03/27/which-icloud-actually...
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#53The unexpected appleID problem is, in my opinion, a world stopping bug...the kind that would cause a code red meltdown if it wasn't fixed 24 hours. This bug has been reported for years, with no resolution. The apple stores pretend the problem doesnt exist or they give you the runaround because their product that "Just Works" doesnt have a fix for it yet. My wife, who was a hopeless apple junkie, has decided that her…
If trying to juggle more than one apple ID in the same storefront is breaking the camel's back, she's in for a world of soul crushing disappointment with any less UX polished product -- which is pretty much all the rest of them.
You should qualify that statement, while no system is perfect, Apple seems to be the only one with a fundamentally broken cloud model.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#54I tried to add iCloud features to an app as part of a contract gig. It was disastrous. The paying customer knew we were capable, but began to wonder what was going on with us -- it was frustrating to have our client lose a bit of respect for us when the cause was the brokenness of iCloud.
They, understandably, thought there was no way that something so heavily promoted by Apple could be such a lemon. And in spite of having heard mumblings of iCloud bugs, we wrote it off as amateur iOS developers.
We ultimately abandoned iCloud prior to release (going with simple Python based server for data storage) -- reading the other posts I'm glad we didn't try to convince ourselves that the 'almost stable' behavior was just a quirk of our devices having been used in development mode.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#55Frustrated 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…
What is this toolset of tomorrow your peers are using to blow past you, if you don't mind me asking?
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#56I'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…
Core Data is barely functional locally, requiring an enormous amount of invasive runtime hooks to create the appearance of a "transparent" (it's anything but) object store on top of Objective-C objects. The fact that anyone, anywhere (including Apple), actually expected Core Data to work as a distributed object store is totally beyond my comprehension.
I have no experience with iCloud, but I'm pleased with Core Data for managing a persistent object graph. It automatically handles version migrations, undo, and faulting, and some interfaces can be populating with almost no code via bindings. I'm happy with it. Still, I'll be very interested to watch the Core Data presentations at WWDC.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#57It'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 .
But only most of the time. Last week, my iPhone inexplicably deleted all the pages in my Notes application that I made in February 2013, around 20 of them. Fortunately, they're still there in my synced e-mail account, but there appears to be no way to sync them "back" onto my iPhone.
And then last month, syncing my iPhone with iTunes inexplicably deleted the 40GB of my music from my iPhone. I hadn't done anything differently from the hundreds (?) of other times I've synced. I just had to go one-by-one and re-check all the playlists I sync, and wait a few hours for all the music to be re-copied. But still.
As easy as Apple products are to use, I'm always afraid something is going to go horribly wrong, in a way I never was with PC's, for example -- they were harder to use, and did less, but you could at least be reasonably sure of what was going on behind the scenes.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lots of things fall under the iCloud umbrella. A lot of them DO work. Just as you only think about the parts that work, ios developers think about the parts that do not work- so to you iCloud works and to them it doesn't even though you're talking about different things in the system.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#59My trust of iCloud disappeared when a restore from backup lost all important data (passwords, Google Authenticator keys, etc.) with no indication. The backup was listed as successful, the restore was listed as successful and yet the only data I needed it to restore was lost. This was also when I learned that Google's process for restoring lost two-factor credentials ultimately ends in an email form which sends to hig…
Google explicitly opted out of backing up authenticator keys.
iCloud would be worse if apps /couldn't/ opt out.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#60I think the reason developers (myself included) try, and re-try to make it work (Coredata + iCloud), despite all the bad experiences and bad stories is that everybody would like badly that it worked. Because if it worked it would be awesome, when I test it and that it works it's really really nice, but I lost confidence in the overall reliability so in the end I never take the risk to ship it.
That's like staying with an abusive spouse because he bought you a nice dinner once.