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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

arstechnica.com

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

#11

Post by potatolicious »

ericcholis wrote: post #7

If 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.

There is indeed an opportunity here for other cloud providers - but "better" is fuzzy. The nice thing about iCloud is that once you set it up on a device, there is no need to configure it or authenticate ever again.

It "just works" (if it actually worked).

With Dropbox, either you are storing everything for all of your users (and paying for it), or you integrate into the user's Dropbox account - which would necessitate a fancy ol' login/authentication system. Far from seamless, and relies on your users subscribing to something that is popular but far from ubiquitous.

So... either pay through the nose for all your users' storage, or force them to jump through some circus hoops on their own. Neither are great.

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

#12

Post by Ovid »

savrajsingh wrote: post #2

Sounds like an opportunity for Dropbox. Go Dropbox!

No, the article covers this. Dropbox is great, but it is based on document syncing. Apple has document syncing working just fine. Like database synching, Apple and Dropbox both have issues. To get a hint of the problem, you can read this post about why git+Dropbox is problematic: http://www.unityisplural.com/2012/02/git-dropbox-bad.html (I've used git+Dropbox and have gotten corruption issues in my git repo).

Further, by pushing an app relying on Dropbox, you're telling your users to sign up for an extra service to use your app. That's bad.

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

#13

Post by Terretta »

saosebastiao wrote: post #3

The 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.

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

#14

Post by zoul »

ericcholis wrote: post #7

If 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.

The great advantage to iCloud (whatever issues there are) is that it’s already there, integrated to the system. There’s almost nothing your users have to do in order to use it, quite unlike Parse and Dropbox. Granted, “almost everybody” has a Dropbox account and it’s free, but the nice thing about Apple devices is that they mostly work (or used to work?) even for people who know almost nothing about computing.

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

#15

Post by saosebastiao »

larrik wrote: post #6
saosebastiao wrote: post #3

The 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?

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 successfully signed on to an old account using her new accounts password. Most of the time she can't sign on at all.

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

#16

Post by kyrra »

ericcholis wrote: post #7

If 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.

While Dropbox is the most popular shared-drive mechanism out there, there are alternatives to it.

1) Google Drive - took my a long time before I even tried it, but it works about as flawless as dropbox for my needs. I actually like it a lot as I use Google Docs heavily, so it makes it easier to use those tools.

2) SkyDrive - offers the most base storage than the other. Has nice support for MS Office products.

3) AeroFS[1] - While it's still in beta, it looks promising (it has limited (android) to non-existant (iphone) support). [1] https://aerofs.com/

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

#17

Post by saurik »

When ever this topic comes up, including at iPhone conferences I attend, no one seems to have ever heard about Simperium, which pretty much has as their mission statement to solve this problem and seems to have actually done so quite well (yet people are mentioning, quite often, only tangentially-related companies like Dropbox); I believe they are even a Y Combinator funded company... I would be fascinated by an explanation of "what they could be doing differently so that people would use them".

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

#18

Post by aidos »

potatolicious wrote: post #5

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…

Good lord, that sounds like a complete mess. I haven't been anywhere near it as a developer so I can't really speak on how bad it is from that point of view.

As a user though I have absolutely no idea what is going in with Apple syncing. My wife has an iphone / mac syncing explosion that I simply can't fix. I just don't have any idea where the data is or why everything is duplicated in her iphoto collection. Or what's going to happen in when you remove something from one place.

Most of all I cannot for the life of me explain to my wife why it is that when she lost her phone and restored a previous backup to a new one it DELETED ALL HER RECENT PHOTOS from off her mac without warning. Gone, forever. I watched it happen before my very eyes and it's made me want to never buy another apple product again.

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

#19

Post by nicholassmith »

There's been quite a few articles from people far smarter than I about it, and most of them agree that whilst doing a server backed database synch service is hard, it shouldn't be this buggy at this stage.

It's like Game Center, Apple doesn't bother with any apps that really use it so there's many, many problems reported on a consistent basis, and they don't seem to use iCloud for anything involving Core Data so they're not dog fooding and having engineers swear at code. No swearing means no one is motivated to go back and try improve it.

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

#20

Post by saosebastiao »

Terretta wrote: post #13
saosebastiao wrote: post #3

The 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.

With my much less polished Android UI, at least I can use my phone.
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