[Macworld]

Post your comments for Developers dish on iCloud's challenges here

[DocNo]

Bottom line - syncing is hard, and reliable syncing is even harder. While frustrating, I don't blame Apple for taking their time.

Now if we are two versions of iOS from today and they still haven't cleaned it up - then shame on them! But I find it hard to believe that something as important as iCloud (Steve even demoted the Mac under it!) is going to languash for long - I would expect all of these issues as well as features we can't even think about to be addressed - eventually. The real question is how long are we going to have to wait?

I suspect with the rumored integration with Mountain Lion, not long. At least I hope so!

[iBookinLA]

Lex -- In your paragraph on "Objections to iCloud," you use the acronym API several times without defining it. I had to go elsewhere to learn that you're talking about the Application Programming Interface.

I wouldn't usually comment about something like this, but you wrote further up on the page that:

"To better understand developer perspectives on iCloud, it’s worth forming a clearer picture of how the technology works—ideally, without requiring that you hold a computer science degree."

Your explanations were indeed clear to this non-computer scientist, but a definition of that tech jargon would have helped.

[macographycn1r]

Interesting comments from the developers.

After reading Fletcher Penney (http://fletcherpenne...opbox_vs_icloud) experience with iCloud I thought that developing with iCloud in mind was easier than sy Dropbox.

Excellent article btw. Apple has invested a lot in iCloud so it wouldn't surprise me if we saw fast improvements in this area.

[flowney]

Unless it's pilot error, my experience with iCloud and Apple's own Calendar application suggests to me that not even Apple can make effective use of iCloud. Calendar items added on one device mysteriously go missing on the others, calendars that shouldn't appear on my iPad (e.g. On My Mac) appear causing double, triple or quadruple duplicate entries. Calendar subscriptions on my desktop appear nowhere else and there's no way to do that in iCloud.
Apple is not eating its own dog food as Steve said they should.

[Jasonmwa]

 flowney, on 24 July 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

Unless it's pilot error, my experience with iCloud and Apple's own Calendar application suggests to me that not even Apple can make effective use of iCloud. Calendar items added on one device mysteriously go missing on the others, calendars that shouldn't appear on my iPad (e.g. On My Mac) appear causing double, triple or quadruple duplicate entries. Calendar subscriptions on my desktop appear nowhere else and there's no way to do that in iCloud.
Apple is not eating its own dog food as Steve said they should.

I remember this being an issue even back in the days of (dot)Mac. However, I have never had issues then or now with syncing services. Any time I had missing appointments or duplicate entries it was always something I had done, not the service. While I won't say the service, whatever iteration (Sherlock, (dot)Mac, MobileMe, iCloud) I have found it very reliable. For me, it has just worked.

[stimarco]

 flowney, on 24 July 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

Unless it's pilot error, my experience with iCloud and Apple's own Calendar application suggests to me that not even Apple can make effective use of iCloud. Calendar items added on one device mysteriously go missing on the others, calendars that shouldn't appear on my iPad (e.g. On My Mac) appear causing double, triple or quadruple duplicate entries. Calendar subscriptions on my desktop appear nowhere else and there's no way to do that in iCloud.
Apple is not eating its own dog food as Steve said they should.

Some of those issues are common side-effects of having iTunes sync with some, but not all, of your devices. I've found iCloud is much more reliable if you keep iTunes the hell out of it.

iTunes is very much a problem here, as in many other areas. I've heard the rumours that Apple are looking at giving iTunes a major shake-up, but until that happens, it's going to cause serious headaches. I hope they split the application into simpler, separate, components in the near future as it's far too bloated and complicated as it stands. It's the very antithesis of everything Apple stands for.

[Diesel50]

 stimarco, on 24 July 2012 - 12:40 PM, said:

 flowney, on 24 July 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

Unless it's pilot error, my experience with iCloud and Apple's own Calendar application suggests to me that not even Apple can make effective use of iCloud. Calendar items added on one device mysteriously go missing on the others, calendars that shouldn't appear on my iPad (e.g. On My Mac) appear causing double, triple or quadruple duplicate entries. Calendar subscriptions on my desktop appear nowhere else and there's no way to do that in iCloud.
Apple is not eating its own dog food as Steve said they should.

Some of those issues are common side-effects of having iTunes sync with some, but not all, of your devices. I've found iCloud is much more reliable if you keep iTunes the hell out of it.

iTunes is very much a problem here, as in many other areas. I've heard the rumours that Apple are looking at giving iTunes a major shake-up, but until that happens, it's going to cause serious headaches. I hope they split the application into simpler, separate, components in the near future as it's far too bloated and complicated as it stands. It's the very antithesis of everything Apple stands for.

I whole heartedly agree with iTunes being the culprit of a lot of iCloud issues. If I sync with just iCloud most of my syncing issues go away. But if i do any kind of mix of the two things tend to get fubar really quick. For the most part iCloud has been super for my music, apps and picts. I dont get too much into document syncing so I cant comment on that.

If I know apple they will continually improve icloud to the point that most if not all of these kinds of problems will go away. Apple has invested billions in new data centers and have already announced plans for billions of more infrastructure data centers to support iCloud, so I expect it to do nothing but get better. You dont invest that kind of money on something your not going to make a big part of your future.

[AnytuneApp]

We (Anystone Technologies) were looking at adding iCloud support to our slow down music app. After trying to get iCloud Core Data working we just gave up. Too complex, and too unreliable. Without even trying we could get it to fail to sync (for no apparent reason) and couldn't get it to come back.

We're definitely on a wait and see with it. Though with the expansion of the amount of data that can be stored in the Key Value sync'd storage, that might be a workaround for us. It wouldn't be ideal, since the data is stored in Core Data, but it's a possibility.

Sean.
http://www.anytune.us

[bryanjclark]

My issue with Simperium is that it doesn't allow for many-to-many relationships. With Core Data, you'll have to explicitly write join tables for your data, which is a big pain.

(Non-nerdy translation: Simperium has a long way to go in supporting very basic database functionality. It's an amazing syncing service, but when it requires complex configuration for a basic Core Data feature, it leads to a lot of work.)

[andrekibbe]

 iBookinLA, on 24 July 2012 - 09:13 AM, said:

Lex -- In your paragraph on "Objections to iCloud," you use the acronym API several times without defining it. I had to go elsewhere to learn that you're talking about the Application Programming Interface.

I wouldn't usually comment about something like this, but you wrote further up on the page that:

"To better understand developer perspectives on iCloud, it’s worth forming a clearer picture of how the technology works—ideally, without requiring that you hold a computer science degree."

Your explanations were indeed clear to this non-computer scientist, but a definition of that tech jargon would have helped.

People who read consumer tech blogs on a daily basis see the acronym API on a daily basis. You might as well be asking them to define RSS every time that term was used. There are sites, like Evolver.fm, that define API every time it's used, but after you've read two or three of their articles in a week, it gets old really fast.

[rlav]

 Diesel50, on 24 July 2012 - 03:51 PM, said:

I whole heartedly agree with iTunes being the culprit of a lot of iCloud issues. If I sync with just iCloud most of my syncing issues go away. But if i do any kind of mix of the two things tend to get fubar really quick. For the most part iCloud has been super for my music, apps and picts. I dont get too much into document syncing so I cant comment on that.

If I know apple they will continually improve icloud to the point that most if not all of these kinds of problems will go away. Apple has invested billions in new data centers and have already announced plans for billions of more infrastructure data centers to support iCloud, so I expect it to do nothing but get better. You dont invest that kind of money on something your not going to make a big part of your future.

I do hope you're right, but it seems to me that Apple doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt in this area. Their standard approach has been to allow problems to go untreated for years and then suddenly rebrand and relaunch. If things don't work pretty much perfectly soon after the launch of iOS 6, my guess is that they never will.

[airmanchairman4c0h]

 Jasonmwa, on 24 July 2012 - 12:35 PM, said:

 flowney, on 24 July 2012 - 10:59 AM, said:

Unless it's pilot error, my experience with iCloud and Apple's own Calendar application suggests to me that not even Apple can make effective use of iCloud. Calendar items added on one device mysteriously go missing on the others, calendars that shouldn't appear on my iPad (e.g. On My Mac) appear causing double, triple or quadruple duplicate entries. Calendar subscriptions on my desktop appear nowhere else and there's no way to do that in iCloud.
Apple is not eating its own dog food as Steve said they should.

I remember this being an issue even back in the days of (dot)Mac. However, I have never had issues then or now with syncing services. Any time I had missing appointments or duplicate entries it was always something I had done, not the service. While I won't say the service, whatever iteration (Sherlock, (dot)Mac, MobileMe, iCloud) I have found it very reliable. For me, it has just worked.

I hopped on the Apple bandwagon just too late for dot Mac, but have used MobileMe and iCloud for notes, contacts, calendaring and reminders across 5 devices, which included a PC (VAIO laptop running Outlook 2007), a MacBook Pro 2011 and 3 iPhones - and through all the furore about MobileMe's disastrous debut up till the present day, the service has just worked for me, disregarding some user error issues that resulted in duplicate (not missing) entries.

One satisfied user here, looking forward to future iterations and deeper Siri integration across the platform.

[robogoboqfy1]

Two comments:

First, Apple doesn't hide the fact that they offer cloud sync technology as one of many incentives to offer Apps on their App store, and they want their 30% cut. So I'm not sympathetic to developers who complain about "having to keep two versions of their apps". They don't. That's their choice to keep a second version without iCloud sync, which allows them to keep the 30%.

Second, Apple's oft-bashed "walled garden" is a one of a kind ecosystem that's attractive mainly for its security, both from malware and for user data privacy. The fact that Apple is the only one with access to data that's created or used by third party apps is a good thing, perhaps the best feature of iCloud. Simperium's option to allow developers to keep a copy of user data goes flat out against the notion of cloud security. I don't know these developers from Adam. I just paid $1.99 for their app and I don't necessarily want them to have my user data to do "cool things" with it.