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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

#41

Post by kybernetyk »

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…

After seeing the fate of mac.com and me.com I didn't even consider using iCloud for 'cloud storage'/sync for our Mac app. (We went with Dropbox).

Apple has a long story of half-finished features they try to force onto developers and users. And if that doesn't work the technology gets killed off.

The only downside of not using shiny but questionable new features is that your app won't get featured in the App Store.

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

#42

Post by acdha »

My 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 higgins-prod-lost-hard-landing@google.com which been bouncing since 2011. Thank FSM I had some some backup codes printed…

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

#43

Post by dpratt »

raverbashing wrote: post #37
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…

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 ser…

You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right?

I know it's fashionable to hate on Java, for a lot of good reasons, but I think it's naive to dismiss the power of the platform itself.

We may all have (completely valid) complaints about the outdated and verbose syntax of the language, but the actual JVM itself is fantastic. There are more scalable, fault-tolerant, high performance Java systems out there than the rest of the implementations on all other platforms, combined.

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

#44

Post by archivator »

vacri wrote: post #28
saosebastiao wrote: post #15

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.

You're assuming it's intentional. The first thing that comes to my mind is inconsistent state between multiple authentication servers.

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

#45

Post by zoul »

ianstallings wrote: post #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…

This sounds unfair. I have been developing for the platform right from the start and I am very happy about the whole toolchain. My only real gripes are with the review process, nothing else. (I have never used iCloud as a developer, so I can’t comment on that.)

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

#46

Post by doe88 »

I 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.

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

#48

Post by pifflesnort »

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…

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.

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

#49

Post by raverbashing »

dpratt wrote: post #43
raverbashing wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right? I know it's fashionable to hate on Java, for a lot of good reasons, but I think it's naive to dismiss the power of the platform itself. We may all have (completely valid) complaints about the outdated and verbose syntax of the language, but the actual JVM itself is fantastic. There are more scalable, fault-tolerant, high performance Java system…

"You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right?"

Yes, I know. The problem is not Java directly. Reread what I wrote

Google has the infrastructure and resources to make Java work for them at their size. Because they have whole teams dedicated to build their infrastructure (FS, storage, etc)

Apple has to optimize their resources. They're not going to rebuild what Google did and I'm not seeing them using, I don't know: Cassandra, Hadoop, etc

What I'm saying is that Apple is probably trying to reinvent the wheel. With their resources, they should go with Scala, Clojure or use helper technologies.

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

#50

Post by potatolicious »

kybernetyk wrote: post #41
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…

After seeing the fate of mac.com and me.com I didn't even consider using iCloud for 'cloud storage'/sync for our Mac app. (We went with Dropbox). Apple has a long story of half-finished features they try to force onto developers and users. And if that doesn't work the technology gets killed off. The only downside of not using shiny but questionable new features is that your app won't get featured in the App Store.

> "The only downside of not using shiny but questionable new features is that your app won't get featured in the App Store."

This is a pretty huge downside. The App Store is a huge mess - there is effectively no web frontend for it, it's tied deeply into a desktop application, and it's obtuse. This makes marketing nigh impossible and results in Apple having an enormous, and disproportionate, ability to pick winners and losers.

Being featured is a Big Deal(tm).

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