Apple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.
To test this theory, simply ask an average iPhone or Android user what encryption is.
What you are saying here is the equivalent to me buying a plane ticket, but also having the option to fly the plane as well.
If you want to manage your own data - use something like a PinePhone - the barrier to entry is high enough that people who are capable of managing their own data securely can use the device and achieve the data sovereignty outcome they require.
That said, I believe Apple should build and manage their own infrastructure. They have the resources and capabilities to do so. The longer Apple stick’s with GCP the larger the inertia of moving away and the less leverage they have when it comes to negotiating to maintain their high standard of privacy commitments.
Most normal usera may not be able to secure things effectively and they can still use the existing iCloud / Google Play infrastructure. That doesn't mean that other users, who want to manage their own data for one reason or another, shouldn't get the opportunity.
It's far more likely that building and maintaining this feature is not worth the development time for Apple and Google product teams at this point, since the possible market is small
By that I mean, storage in iCloud is optional. You can back up Macs locally pretty easily with Time Machine and you can back up iPhones to Macs locally as well (which then gets backed up via Time Machine). You can encrypt Time Machine and iPhone backups too if you want.
Is it as easy as using iCloud for backups, photo syncing, etc.? No, but that’s because iCloud is not just dumb storage, it’s a hosted software application (several, really).
I ended up just plugging the iPhone into the computer and exporting the photos that way.
I think we could see full device backups to other cloud services later. I guess the problem is they would want to provide a specific api for 3rd parties to implement rather than trying to drop a 256GB zip file on google drive with no differential backups.
You can set an iOS geofence (without sharing your location with it) so it automatically syncs each time you come home.
No affiliation; happy user.
edit: I guess my point is that different people have different computer skills and I think it's great that the tools now exist so people on the lower end of that spectrum can sort this out themselves without having to ask for help.
I've moved everything to the cloud. I have nothing running at home except networking gear, and a small "server" that pulls nightly backups from the clouds to a local USB drive.
In theory i could probably do without the local server if looking at Apple/Microsoft/Google data redundancy (Microsoft is multi geo, i can't figure out what Apple is).
Sadly i need to guarantee that some random account closure doesn't remove all my data, so the backup server stays for now. The way cloud prices are going, it will only be a question of months/years before it's cheaper/easier to just utilize two cloud services, one for main storage and one for backup storage, and with projects like the data transfer project [1], you don't even need to download them first.