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Developers Unhappy With Bug Causing iCloud Unreliability

Never put all your eggs in one basket. I like Apple devices, but I've moved away from Keychain (now using Bitwarden) and iCloud (now on MEGAsync). Recently I started migrating my web work to Firefox. Even setting aside any current issues with iCloud - all of these are arguably better than Apple's offerings.

Lock-in doesn't help you - just the company that's locking you in.
 
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fbr$ said:
iCloud sucks, I update a note in the Notes app on my iPad and it takes a long time to update it on my iPhone. Same for Files, Photos...
Click to expand...
Same here. It has gotten super bad about this with the 15.2.1 garbage update we got. I find that if I close and reopen the Notes app on another device then it updates it fairly quick. Otherwise, slower than a snail's pace.
 
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I know people like to have beef with iCloud (the various umbrella of services that encompass it), but up until about the launch of iOS 15, CloudKit — one of a handful of technologies and the one at hand causing grief — was incredibly stable and reliable and has been one of the better sync engines I've worked with over the previous 7 years.

It is unfortunate as the team behind CloudKit had been very aggressive about looking into and fixing issues up until these particular things started happening — to the point of being annoying in investigating problems. I wonder what is going on...

I think it's easy to criticize app developers for using a technology that is currently having issues, but it is available to them and was pretty stable; but of course that sentiment is ignoring a lot just to have some snarky point. Sync is hard and can literally outweigh the core function of an app; working to minimize that but provide a decent experience by relying on the system is sometimes the only choice if you want sync at all. Plus there're so many layers of complexity involved in the process, I think what most people struggle with interfacing layers on top of CK which give this particular service a bad rep — Apple being the first to put some crappy integrations together (Safari Tab Groups is literally the worst.. and a tool called persistent cloud container for developers was BROKEN between 15.0 and 15.2).
 
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Westside guy said:
Never put all your eggs in one basket. I like Apple devices, but I've moved away from Keychain (now using Bitwarden) and iCloud (now on MEGAsync). Recently I started migrating my web work to Firefox. Even setting aside any current issues with iCloud - all of these are arguably better than Apple's offerings.

Lock-in doesn't help you - just the company that's locking you in.
Click to expand...
In short: You‘ve done all the groundwork for a quick and trouble free Migration to another platform, ehhh…?

Regards

P.S. I‘m also in the middle of moving all my gear away from the more and more flaky Apple platforms; smartphones nearly completed, mac‘s too on the way out. I‘m fed up with any speed gains theoretically possible on M1 gear being wasted by frequent crashes, bugs or weird behavior, irrespective of platform.

Windows is becoming quite relaxing in daily use, lately ;-)
 
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Not to worry, everyone! I just finished talking to a Senior Advisor who has been talking with Engineering. The Senior Advisor assured me that this if this were an issue, Apple would know about it before any customer or developer experienced it because Apple interacts with iCloud billions of times a second. So, to troubleshoot this known issues, Engineering stated folks need to completely remove iCloud from their devices. This does not mean sign-out from iCloud but rather completely uninstall iCloud from each and every device you own, by dragging iCloud to the trash, emptying the trash, and re-starting your devices. Now, the Senior Advisor acknowledged there is no way for the customer to do this. So, because customers cannot follow the troubleshooting steps from Engineering, Apple's Official Position on the Matter is that no further support will be provided until the customer follows the steps provided by Engineering and the customer must keep their devices up-to-date with the latest OS.
 
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goonie4life9 said:
Not to worry, everyone! I just finished talking to a Senior Advisor who has been talking with Engineering. The Senior Advisor assured me that this if this were an issue, Apple would know about it before any customer or developer experienced it because Apple interacts with iCloud billions of times a second. So, to troubleshoot this known issues, Engineering stated folks need to completely remove iCloud from their devices. This does not mean sign-out from iCloud but rather completely uninstall iCloud from each and every device you own, by dragging iCloud to the trash, emptying the trash, and re-starting your devices. Now, the Senior Advisor acknowledged there is no way for the customer to do this. So, because customers cannot follow the troubleshooting steps from Engineering, Apple's Official Position on the Matter is that no further support will be provided until the customer follows the steps provided by Engineering and the customer must keep their devices up-to-date with the latest OS.
Click to expand...
Hilarious! You’ve nailed it perfectly!

Regards
 
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ouimetnick said:
iCloud syncing has always been unreliable. Remember how long it took them to fix iCloud tabs in safari? Old tabs closed weeks ago would reappear, support promised a fix was coming, but never really did. Eventually it started working again for most folks though, and we think you’re gonna love it.
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It never started working reliably for me. Plus, bonus is that I’ll lose it entirely if I update beyond iOS 12, because my Macs are stuck at High Sierra and iOS 13 breaks iCloud synch with Safari on High Sierra.
 
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PsykX said:
I'll continue to say it : iCloud has never been reliable.
I assume it's because its foundations come from the defunct MobileMe service.
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I assume it’s because Apple don’t put any priority on existing things work before trying to sell us on another device upgrade with new features...

...And because Apple don’t eat their own dog food, or the execs are privileged to have the best possible functional configuration and don’t know how broken Apple product is.
 
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Mascots said:
I know people like to have beef with iCloud (the various umbrella of services that encompass it), but up until about the launch of iOS 15, CloudKit — one of a handful of technologies and the one at hand causing grief — was incredibly stable and reliable and has been one of the better sync engines I've worked with over the previous 7 years.

It is unfortunate as the team behind CloudKit had been very aggressive about looking into and fixing issues up until these particular things started happening — to the point of being annoying in investigating problems. I wonder what is going on...

I think it's easy to criticize app developers for using a technology that is currently having issues, but it is available to them and was pretty stable; but of course that sentiment is ignoring a lot just to have some snarky point. Sync is hard and can literally outweigh the core function of an app; working to minimize that but provide a decent experience by relying on the system is sometimes the only choice if you want sync at all. Plus there're so many layers of complexity involved in the process, I think what most people struggle with interfacing layers on top of CK which give this particular service a bad rep — Apple being the first to put some crappy integrations together (Safari Tab Groups is literally the worst.. and a tool called persistent cloud container for developers was BROKEN between 15.0 and 15.2).
Click to expand...
If CloudKit is stable and reliable then maybe Apple should start using it for 1st party apps. How is it that when I open Spotify I have correct state displayed almost instantly, but with Apple app (like Books) I have to wait and hope. Will it sync the correct page? How long will it take this time? What happens if I switch page in the meantime? Will it override the one in the cloud? How are normal people supposed to understand all this?
 
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temende said:
I still run into issues with syncing iCloud tabs in Safari. Most other iCloud sync works fine though.
Click to expand...
As well as Safari not syncing much... My reminders don’t synch much, either. The only time one device will check with the others/server is if I delete an old reminder. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Other devices show the notifications that have already been cleared on another device.

Logging out and back into iCloud on every device every few days isn’t an acceptable “fix”, but that’s all they offer us.

So broken.
 
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