Developers Unhappy With Bug Causing iCloud Unreliability

[hanske68]

Apple makes decent hardware, but in general their software is below par. Look at the mess syncing makes in the user's home directory on macos. To me it feels like Apple makes unexperienced trainees work on lots of software projects, and then let other trainees fix the numerous bugs (not even bothering about flaky architecture designs). Result: one big mess, being turned into an even bigger mess. Repeat.

 

[ignatius345]

Very annoying bug, I rely heavily on iCloud for my documents and the sync issues are driving me crazy. I hope it will be fixed soon

Totally. And I always think it's something with my machine.

I find iCloud maddening because it's really nice when it works -- but when it doesn't it's a total black box. I left Dropbox a long time ago, but I always appreciated that they give users better transparency and control over what's syncing.

 

[ignatius345]

Is there a single Apple app / bit of hardware or software for which anyone can truthfully say 'it just works'?

I've been using an Airport Extreme router for a long time (too long). It's rock solid and I'd say it fits that description.

 

[Siliconguy]

Is there a single Apple app / bit of hardware or software for which anyone can truthfully say 'it just works'?

My M1 MacBook Air works fine (with one exception, see below). But I have iCloud disabled. It went on a 'Death to File Foo' binge, deleting it even from places I wanted to keep it. I only wanted Foo deleted from the laptop, not from the rest of time and space. So iCloud is gone, replaced by my My_Cloud on my own server. Oh yes, iCloud somehow managed to delete the updated contacts and replace them with the old contacts. So iCloud is demoted to evil, kill on sight.

Also Siri is turned off. And Location (I know where I am, and if I don't a compass and a topographic map will be far more useful.) And since Pages and Numbers do not support ODF, they are useless and deleted. Keynote is deleted because I don't do presentations.

The exception to the M1 working fine is that my external DVD drive does not work on the M1. No idea why. It works on a 2014 mini.

 

[noone]

iCloud has been a hot mess since its inception. I'm not sure if it is because it is based off of legacy iTools and.Mac and has just had additional functionality tacked on (à la iTunes) but for a company of their size and budget it's inexcusable. Especially since they keep making it a key component of their devices/services.

Don't even get me started on the iCloud webmail interface.

 

[DSL Steve]

Well, I guess I'm the oddball here.

iCloud has been working perfectly across 13 devices, one of them a Windows 11 pc.

iCloud email accounts, Apple TVs, iPads, iPhones, Homepod mini's, and an M1 mini, all sync email, photo's, documents, notes, reminders, calendars, bookmarks etc. with no issues and fairly rapidly.

Been using iCloud for many years.

 

[Mascots]

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?

Yikes — I think you are upset with the wrong person and might want to check your aggression towards me here; just because I said a few positives about it doesn't mean I am trying to negate your experience or claim its perfect. I don't think normal people are supposed to understand this and I neither doubted claims of problems, but I certainly know no one will care to help them with an attitude like that in response to pretty neutral talk.

 

[ambientdaw]

Never used sync functions. Never used iCloud. Never trusted it. I believe that seed was planted with the iTunes/Match fiasco way back where people's music libraries were destroyed.

 

[citysnaps]

Well, I guess I'm the oddball here.

iCloud has been working perfectly across 13 devices, one of them a Windows 11 pc.

iCloud email accounts, Apple TVs, iPads, iPhones, Homepod mini's, and an M1 mini, all sync email, photo's, documents, notes, reminders, calendars, bookmarks etc. with no issues and fairly rapidly.

Been using iCloud for many years.

Yeah same here, see my post above. Apparently we're the only two if one were to read and believe all of the above comments about how awful it is. Cracks me up.

 

[LV426]

Apple don't divulge the underpinnings of iCloud, but I rather suspect they make extensive use of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and CDN providers (e.g. CloudFlare). iCloud was around for a long time before Apple started building their own servers.

All of these technologies can yield http 503 errors. They can be intermittent and/or very difficult to pin down.

In my former life as a developer, I had to be particularly careful to carefully implement retry mechanisms (such as Polly) to minimise the effects of transient service errors.

 

[rgeneral]

Those engineers have left the company?

 

[ThisBougieLife]

Syncing is my main gripe with the "ecosystem" (not that I'm convinced any of the alternatives are much better). Photos often take long to upload or don't upload at all so I use AirDrop instead to get them from my Phone to my Mac, Podcasts syncing on the Apple TV has been non-functional for at least a year and even between the phone and my Mac it's not great...I would love to see improvements to iCloud and to the Music app (which are apparently coming). That would make the software just about perfect to me.

 

[vault]

Yikes — I think you are upset with the wrong person and might want to check your aggression towards me here; just because I said a few positives about it doesn't mean I am trying to negate your experience or claim its perfect. I don't think normal people are supposed to understand this and I neither doubted claims of problems, but I certainly know no one will care to help them with an attitude like that in response to pretty neutral talk.

I'm sorry, anger wasn't directed at you. It's just infuriating when tech doesn't work.

 

[riclf]

I'm a 100% Mac User,and full time developer.
Guess where all my work sits?
OneDrive ! Try it, no iCloud 503's.

 

[ackmondual]

I'm guessing when they say "it just works", iCloud gets the asteriks?

 

[MrDerby01]

Apple has become more and more sloppy these days. They think just their name alone is higher than Jesus.

 

[Diamond Dog]

Everything iCloud is spotty for me. Worst is probably Messages in iCloud. Doesn't matter what I do on one device, all the other devices are out of sync with one another. Sometimes deleting a conversation will delete it on another device. Sometimes it won't. Some messages sync, some don't.

 

[BanjoDudeAhoy]

Well, at least I finally know why my GoodNotes notes haven’t been syncing properly. It’s not much of an issue since I only use it on one device at a time and they do eventually sync. But it’s annoying to see the message so often.

I assume it also explains the lag in my reminders syncing between devices.

 

[BanjoDudeAhoy]

Stories like this are why I wish app makers wouldn’t succumb to the temptation to make CloudKit their apps’ only method of dealing with cloud storage. Give us options. Work, also, with cloud storage companies that aren’t being jerks about their respective APIs, especially where macOS and iOS users are concerned.

I don’t know how Microsoft are in that regard but at least for me as a OneDrive user, it has always worked well.
I wish more apps offered using OneDrive for storage/syncing.

 

[npmacuser5]

iCloud does not sync well with Apple apps. Just today, sent a PDF to iCloud using the iPad Files app. Still has not arrived to my Mac. Both looking at the same files folder. It may magically appear or never. At home, I have been using Airdrop for file sharing. Frustrating using iCloud.

 

[Mascots]

I'm sorry, anger wasn't directed at you. It's just infuriating when tech doesn't work.

Absolutely no worries, thanks for being cool! Plus I completely understand — trust me, I am equally as frustrated because not only do I personally use iCloud for things, I depend on it as a reliable backend for dev — it is ridiculous that this is the state we are in!

 

[Danfango]

iCloud works fine for me. No problems at all.

However Apple use SRE teams and they have service level objectives and they know this is happening. The only outcomes are:

1. This is within their error budget so they don’t care.
2. They are fixing it.

Either way they should be publishing status information to their customers. That should include response success rate by service. And not just the complete failure green and red light crap like AWS and Azure etc.

The completely opaque communications on their infrastructure is pretty terrible and really dents confidence.

Although after all this I’m a heavy AWS user and their stuff craps random errors all over the place constantly. Microsoft’s god awful GraphQL API is even worse. I’m surprised anything ever gets built on it.

The whole world is held together with mud, poop and straw.

 

[nt5672]

I’ll tell you why, it’s because Apple doesn’t know how to fix it

Apple has the worst services team. Why? Because it has never been important to Apple.

 

[nt5672]

I've been using an Airport Extreme router for a long time (too long). It's rock solid and I'd say it fits that description.

That was deigned by the hardware team that left Apple. I think they went to Ubiquity, but I could be wrong.

 

[MattG]

iCloud sync is GARBAGE and has been for a long time, particularly for those of us who use mixed environments (Mac/Windows). The sync client on Windows is SO BAD. It'll just stop syncing, it says nothing, and the way I always figure it out is when I randomly go to look for one of my photos (by going to "iCloud Photos" in Windows), and I see that none of the pics I've taken on my phone for the past two weeks are there. So, I click on the iCloud icon in my task bar and then "Open iCloud Settings," where it makes me sign in even though I already had (a couple weeks ago or whatever), and during that time the system gave me ZERO indication it was signed out and not syncing. This has happened to both me and my wife. She actually lost a bunch of data because she assumed that since iCloud client was running (and not complaining about anything), that everything was syncing.

On average I have to do this process 2-3 times a month, across various Windows machines. It pains me to say it but OneDrive works MUCH better. In addition to being much faster, it actually tells you when there's a problem.