Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
1–10 of 192 posts
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#2Sounds like an opportunity for Dropbox. Go Dropbox!
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#3The 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 current iPhone5 will be her last apple product...with her continued frustration with AppleId authentication being the straw that broke the camels back.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#4Apple's dalek lawyers will emerge chanting litigate! Litigate! Litigate!
Serious Apple have always done a crappy job of online services - why would you expect any more.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#5I'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 talk into a "here's the mic, anybody have any idea what's going on with this thing" affair. Helpful, but indicative of the state of things.
IMO, from having studied this for many, many hours over many moons, is that what Apple is trying to do is fundamentally hard, if not entirely unfeasible. They're trying to replace a smart server with one that's dumb as a doorstop. More specifically, they're trying to emulate a CRUD web service with a file sync engine.
Conflict resolution is left up to individual clients, since the server doesn't do any "thinking". Likewise, there is no canonical, authoritative state of the store, since the server doesn't "think", only the clients do. Apple was hoping that by shoving a bunch of diffs of your database onto the server, that clients can reliably reconstruct a sane database by playing them back - except that multiple clients are updating the diffs simultaneously and there is no server-side conflict resolution.
Oh, and if stuff fails, there are no regular snapshot states to fall back to, because iCloud is a file store, not a database engine. Your whole store is now corrupt. Enjoy.
Oh, and there's no way to nuke the database and start over - there are metadata files that are undocumented or that we don't even have sandbox access to, that interfere with completely destroying the database.
At this point you might think "Fine! I'll go to my Settings -> iCloud -> Manage Storage menu and delete everything associated with that app and start it off on a clean slate!"
And then you find out that, even today, in iOS 6.1.3 land, there is a bug from iOS 5.0 where if you delete an app's iCloud bucket it can never be created by that app, on that account, ever again. I wish I were exaggerating. In perpetuity. Presumably some state gets fucked and now this app is forever more unable to store anything on iCloud.
To make even the most trivial experiment on the iCloud API involves creating a brand new app.
iCloud (in so far as it relates to Core Data and document storage) isn't just buggy, isn't just poorly implemented - it's non-functional.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#6The 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…
I read the whole article, and I read all the HN comments (so far), but I still have no idea what the "unexpected appleID problem" is. Care to explain, for the unintiated like me?
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#7If I'm not mistaken, there seem to be better cross platform options in Parse and Dropbox. A case can be made for the "walled garden", iCloud doesn't seem to be one of them.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#8It'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 saw some comments elsewhere along the lines of "iCloud works fine for me as a user, so it's probably just bad developers who can't get it to work, not any issue with Apple."
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#9Sounds like an opportunity for Dropbox. Go Dropbox!
Many points of the article are related to conflict resolution and CoreData sync, both of which features that are a) incredibly hard to get right and b) practically unsupported by Dropbox. Dropbox' method of conflict "resolution" is to keep to files around and its method of synching databases is to not do it.
There are other places where Dropbox has advantages over iCloud (like doucments being shared between applications, even though the dropbox api seem to move away from that and on to sandboxed application folders), but for the points made in the original article, Dropbox provides no help at all.
Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up
#10Expect Parse to be bought soon..