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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

> If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.

I would like to argue this is at least partly the fault of app developers, for adding iCloud support without the conflict handling mechanism.

However, why does Xcode, Apple's own in-house app, not support conflict handling?! Apple's own software should be setting the standard for third-party developers. If they don't handle version conflicts, of course no one else will either.

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Hi, original author here. Maybe I wrote it a bit misleading. The thing is: It's independent of the editor. Even if you use an editor that _does_ support conflict handling you can lose the content.

Just assume you write something, save, close the editor and never open it again. iCloud might replace the content of that file and there is no way for you to know.

The only way to prevent losing your data is setting up a Git repository or open _every important file_ regularly in an editor that supports conflict handling.

Ah, thank you! I assumed there was some Apple API which is supposed to handle this situation (that's how this really should work IMO), and the apps mentioned had decided to suppress the user message and just pick the newer version or some such.

The system APIs should not silently delete important data when the apps haven't implemented the feature.

This is an iCloud bug, not an Xcode one.

I'm conflicted.

Obviously, deleting data is bad.

However, Dropbox's "(John Doe’s conflicted copy)" solution is also pretty awful UX. I can understand why Apple would want to use its uniquely integrated software ecosystem to come up with a better system. I believe they could do it—but they clearly have not.

Agreed. I'm not saying the Dropbox approach is the best. It is better than silently deleting content, though.

A different approach would be to add a way to see files that have issues. Similar to how Dropbox shows files that fail to upload.

It's awful but still better than silently deleting.

Maybe it's awful UX but it's the best you can have and it makes good sense, because there is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for arbitrary file types. You might as well save all the copies and let user figure it out themselves -- user would know much better than Dropbox how to handle the situation.

> There is no way Dropbox can support merge conflict for arbitrary file types.

For Dropbox, I agree. Apple could do it though; that's the advantage of having such great control over your ecosystem.

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