iCloud Web Services = webapps on icloud.com?

[mark-vdw]

One thing from the WWDC keynote that I didn't fully understand was when they mentioned iCloud Web Services being now available to developers. Does this mean that we will start seeing 3rd-party webapps hosted on the iCloud.com springboard?

 

[Rigby]

Cloudkit Web Services enables developers to access data that their apps maintain in iCloud from outside the app via an HTTP-based interface. It could, for example, be used by a developer to provide access to said data in iCloud from an external web page, or synchronize the data with existing web applications. But no, you won't see any 3rd party apps showing up on Apple's icloud.com portal anytime soon.

Some preliminary documentation is available here:

https://developer.apple.com/library...vicesReference/Introduction/Introduction.html

 

[mark-vdw]

Cloudkit Web Services enables developers to access data that their apps maintain in iCloud from outside the app via an HTTP-based interface. It could, for example, be used by a developer to provide access to said data in iCloud from an external web page, or synchronize the data with existing web applications. But no, you won't see any 3rd party apps showing up on Apple's icloud.com portal anytime soon.

Thanks for the clarification. You seem to know what you're talking about, so hope you don't mind if I ask a simple follow-up: why not? Are there technical challenges to allowing 3rd party apps hosted on their portal? Security challenges in running other people's code on their servers perhaps? Or is it more that it more or less goes against their overall business strategy (sell the hardware, not the services)?