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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

#21

Post by aidos »

kyrra wrote: post #16
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) Aero…

I can vouch for AeroFS. We're using it internally for sharing large documents around and it make it really painless.

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

#22

Post by timjahn »

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".

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

#23

Post by madeofpalk »

timjahn wrote: 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

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

#24

Post by potatolicious »

saurik wrote: post #17

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 expl…

> "I would be fascinated by an explanation of "what they could be doing differently so that people would use them"."

I've also never heard of them until now. Perhaps they should show up to said conferences, or at least keep tabs on Core Data-related talks at conferences and give the organizations/speakers a heads up.

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

#25

Post by smackfu »

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.

I'm not too familiar with Parse, but Dropbox is not solving the same problem as the feature of iCloud that developers are complaining about. Whole file syncing is comparatively easy from the server side. If there a conflict between the server-side file and the client-side file, the app has to work out how to handle it. Core Data (basically a local database) syncing tries to handle conflict resolution automatically, since it has knowledge of the data structures. That's tricky, and that's the part that doesn't work well.

I haven't seen many complaints about iCloud's file syncing features, which are what Dropbox is the direct competitor to.

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

#26

Post by mikeash »

smackfu wrote: 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…

Even more than that, iCloud Core Data syncing appears to be so broken that approximately nobody is able to even ship an app that uses it. Thus, users are never exposed to the brokenness because it's so broken you can't give it to them.

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

#27

Post by mikeash »

timjahn wrote: 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".

That's because the parts that are broken are so broken that developers can never even get to the point of shipping software to you that uses them.

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

#28

Post by vacri »

saosebastiao wrote: post #15
larrik wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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

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

#29

Post by mikeash »

Ovid wrote: post #12
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…

It's true that git+Dropbox isn't resilient in the face of multiple simultaneous writes, but I think the problem is overstated. You might see an inconsistent state, but you'll never get corrupted data because of it. You might corrupt the repository on Dropbox (has happened to me a couple of times), but this is trivially fixed by deleting and recreating it.

I'd never use it for a large team, but for a couple of collaborators, or syncing a repository between multiple computers for a single developer, it's a nice and easy solution.

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