I can’t find the article anymore but I remember reading several years ago the original developer of iCloud said that iCloud syncing could never reliably work and said that eventually an account would hit an edge case and sync would collapse with catastrophic effects especially when the primary copy thinks another (not primary copy) is the primary copy, causing the actual primary copy to be incorrectly overridden.
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Developers Unhappy With Bug Causing iCloud Unreliability
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Well, it’s easy doable, their APIs are easy to implement. The problem is, it’s not automatically available to all end users like iCloud, they require an extra registration, except if the dev set his own cloud infrastructure up, for e.g. app settings, save games, etc.
iCloud is the Yugo of cloud services.
Daily over at r/iCloud there is some new iCloud user discovering the awesomeness that is iCloud reliability when it comes to syncing files and photos. Give them a week or so and they come back and complain about the iCloud email and its awesome performance, especially when it comes to silent filtering. The newest complaints are about hosting your own domain for email in iCloud. Some happy campers there.
Apple should just scrap the whole thing and pay Microsoft to host iCloud data and email. Just reskin Outlook webmail and OneDrive for Apple customers.
Safari Tab Group creation on Mac has become a total disaster, because Safari would immediately delete the group created on Mac with no discernible reason, only to find those empty groups appearing on iPad just fine. I have been wanted to move a Group of tabs from the same source to another one for a long time, but unable to.
Often times when I accidentally close Safari, ALL newly created tabs are GONE, GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE. It’s not being synced at all, more like server data being forced to override local data. Absolute terrible experience.
Notes iCloud syncing is also a huge mess. I need to restart notes app or even restart the device to see the changes if I am lucky.
Meanwhile OneDrive for Business has the Service Assurance guarantee for all of its users, works far more reliably than iCloud in terms of file syncing and such, version control is amazing.
I have give up all hopes believing Apple stuff “just works”, because it no longer does.
Often times when I accidentally close Safari, ALL newly created tabs are GONE, GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE. It’s not being synced at all, more like server data being forced to override local data. Absolute terrible experience.
Notes iCloud syncing is also a huge mess. I need to restart notes app or even restart the device to see the changes if I am lucky.
Meanwhile OneDrive for Business has the Service Assurance guarantee for all of its users, works far more reliably than iCloud in terms of file syncing and such, version control is amazing.
I have give up all hopes believing Apple stuff “just works”, because it no longer does.
Welcome to the cloud folks where retries in code logic is a standard. This is how a highly distributed micro service architecture works. Sure Apple could make their stuff more graceful on error messages and retry for you but this is nothing new. AWS and GCP have the same issues
You all must be using some magic version of OneDrive. For years OneDrive has been a disaster, not just for me but for our entire company. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been “logged out” of OneDrive for no apparent reason or warning for that matter. Sometimes I’ll work for days without OneDrive syncing. And as others have mentioned often the only way to “fix” syncing issues is to log out and create a new OneDrive folder. Never had to do that with iCloud. Happens at least every 9 months or so with OneDrive.
All this and then some.
Yep.
Icloud drive alone is so buggy it’s infuriating. If Apple can’t get their own to work, what chance does a third party have?
This is probably related to the issue I was having recently on M1Pro where I couldn't get the basic functionality of Safari tab groups to work. Like creating, deleting, renaming a tab reverts back after about 15 seconds, then when I tried to update using an iOS device, only then I got what I wanted to do with the tab group.
Ah, no. Fair point. Still though, I'd put my Apple TV (current gen) in the "it just works" category. And problems I've had have almost always been related to third-party apps versus the device itself.
I think getting this right gets harder over time as stuff gets more complex.
iCloud is the main reason why I stopped using Safari on my computers. Also its mailbox is full of spams that I’m forced to stop using it.
'Notes' and 'Numbers' are two areas where I've never really had any iCloud issues. Lucky I guess?
Apple is just a company that wants your money. They are a whole lot like a pseudo-government. Nothing we say will affect them. Withhold your money from them for a few years and I bet they do better. They need a real competitor. The market is overripe for competition.
You do know that will not earn you any forum cred here!
Note: Starting a sentence with "You do know..." is such haughty BS. Just wanted to call that out with an example since so many people do that here.
HTTP status code 503 is Service Unavailable. It sounds like a scaling issue to me. Too many users and not enough iCloud servers? Regardless, one would think Apple's iCloud API would provide an exact error message whenever this happens, so developers can respond accordingly in their apps.
The days of competition are over. We are in the age of monopoly power. Per Jacques Attali men like Tim Cook and Satya Nadella are the new feudal overlords of the world.
The days of competition are over. We are in the age of monopoly power. Per Jacques Attali men like Tim Cook and Satya Nadella are the new feudal overlords of the world.
So is this why this week deleted Shortcuts keep showing back up in my app? I now also have 2 Shortcuts stuck on my watch that are deleted on my phone. Very annoying.
This has been happening with iCloud Calendar since late November, one of my publicly shared calendars kept disappearing from my info screen, and the reason turned out to be 503 errors for the calendar subscription. These errors come and go, sometimes the calendar is unavailable for days. Really making me think about switching to Google services for this as well.
It's not just third-party apps. Last week I had created a new document in Notes, and it wasn't appearing across devices. I think I had created it the night before on my iPhone, but when I discovered that it was missing from my iPad and a Mac, I still had to wait an hour or two for the simple text document to propagate across devices. All devices were connected and functioning fine otherwise.
And something similar though generally less long lived OFTEN happens with Photos. Both iPhone and iPad Photos say they're updated, but they have different total number of photos and just sit there for 30 minutes to an hour before they really sync (and then start downloading full photos).
And something similar though generally less long lived OFTEN happens with Photos. Both iPhone and iPad Photos say they're updated, but they have different total number of photos and just sit there for 30 minutes to an hour before they really sync (and then start downloading full photos).