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alexpotato

I had a similar experience:

- My wife had cloud sync on her iPhone for Notes

- I thought: "we probably don't need that" so turned it off for her

- She turns on her phone and goes "Where are all of my notes?? What did you do?"

- I break out in a cold sweat

- I remember we had an iPad that also had the sync'ed Notes app

- I open that up and immediately turn off WiFi to "save" the Notes

- We call Apple

- The support person ended up figuring out that we could essentially copy and paste each Note to a new folder so they wouldn't be wiped out.

It was a stressful couple hours though while we worked through it. I would also say that Apple could have given some more warning/pop ups of the full impact of this.

PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc. They ask for permission and I think I may have had to hit "approve" but this is a feature I didn't even think about it till I saw it in action.

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Not excusing the footgun but I'm honestly amazed you could get an Apple rep to help you with notes syncing, let alone recover them. And they helped even if it seems like it was your own fault!

My employer pays (a lot) for Google products and even then there's no way they would ever help with that, let alone on the phone.

In the past I did get a rep on the phone to help with things like access control but I can already hear her tell me (politely) to get lost if I needed help with Keep notes disappearing (which they occasionally do!).

Not sure what you're talking about, if you pay Google for support you get support.

Workspace support is good in my experience, we interact every 2-3 weeks and they can usually resolve our issues or know when to escalate. You can call or chat. I know that you can also get phone support as a consumer now via Google One, but I haven't had to use it yet personally.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Apple’s support is way better than Google’s. Apple’s support is above-average, and Google’s support; even for paying customers, is a regular punchline.

obviously Apples support is better than Googles but it can still be crap.

My girlfriend lost an AirPod a couple of months ago, so we went to an Apple Store for replacement. Turns out the case was a Gen 1 case and the AirPod itself was a Gen 2. They had given her a gen 1 AirPod and it wouldn’t sync with the other one.

We went back and the geniuses explained there was nothing they could do. The day after, I called Apple support and the guy almost started yelling at me, how it was our fault for mixing up the cases etc. Eventually he hung up on me.

I called them back two hours later, explained again what had happened (including the previous phone call). She told me she would call the store and apologized for her colleague.

In the end we ended up getting a refund for the wrong AirPod(but got to keep it) and had to buy new ones.

So Apple support, not always great.

If you did what I'm thinking of, you could have just turned sync back on and all the notes would have reappeared.

This. Turning sync off shouldn't delete notes from iCloud. It just doesn't sync the notes from iCloud to the specific device in question so they are not visible from that device. To confirm OP could have logged in icloud.com from browser and seen the notes there. Then you can decide on a per-device basis whether you want to sync notes and have them be visible on that specific device.

Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear in any of the messaging.

You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud".

And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.

iCloud Photos are even worse. A family member had some corruption or misclick (wasn't there) that made their organized photo albums disappear even though the photos were still present. Luckily they have backup software I set them up with backing up their entire library, so I walked them through restoring from the day before. We then watched as iCloud noticed it was an old copy of the library and helpfully re-deleted all their albums. We never managed to fix it. I hate computing and want off of this.

What if you wanted to really delete the notes from Apple's servers?

IIRC turning off sync asks you this question: “Are you sure you want to continue? All iCloud notes will be removed from your iPhone.”

I feel as if your wife’s Problem was not Apple but the person administering her iOS devices.

You say that but there should be an easy/painless way to get out of iCloud.

In this case there is. You view the main page of notes and it shows the notes under “iCloud”. Create a local folder, move the notes over, and disable iCloud. Easy peasy

Presented to the user as part of the off boarding process rather than separately.

I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

If I have paid for a service good off boarding is part of the service I am paying for.

>If I have paid for a service good off boarding is part of the service I am paying for.

Are you serious? "No off boarding" is Apple's entire business model.

>I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc.

Am I the only one seeing this as a potential security vulnerability? Is there a way to permanently disable this?

Everything is a potential security vulnerability...

And why phones are routinely hacked

If it was true but it's not. The problem with believing rando people rather than reading from the actual source. They can only view your screen and only after you explicitly grant permission via a push notification.

>They can only view your screen and only after you explicitly grant permission via a push notification

Of course, but such a powerful feature could also be exploited by hackers, no?

People here constantly flip their shit because of Intel ME exists which could be exploited for similar access, but seem perfectly OK with this feature form Apple.

This is literally the same as sharing your screen during a video call. You can open FaceTime and share your screen with anyone you choose.

think of it as something like teamviewer. there is many objective reasons not to use apple, but this is probably not one of them. I could be wrong of course

Hm, any details on that "VNC" functionality? Is it iPad only, or iOS too? Was the approval request a system pop up? Did it open a named application? Did you see what they did on the screen when they were on it? Has this been written about anywhere?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201370

This is an article about Switch Control, which is an accessibility feature for people with (extremely) limited dexterity, not a remote control feature for customer support.

update : i screwed up the link above. thanks to adjacent comment for noticing.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205644

supposedly however switch control works to control other devices on the same wifi network. perhaps there's a vpn trick in the support side to leverage it over the internet at large.

It's supported on Mac/iPad/iPhone and you get a popup granting approval. It shows the standard screen sharing UI while the session is ongoing.

You can find some more information here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/5mnpt2/comment/dc5n4...

It's similar to FaceTime screen sharing, the support employee can only see a video feed of your screen but can't directly interact with it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212734

Incorrect. Apple support can VIEW your screen but they can't make any changes. And just to note they can't view your screen with you approving via a push notification.

Also they cannot see password fields or your keyboard when using them, and the like, at least on iOS and iPadOS. Apple hides sensitive inputs in regular screen sharing as well, and occasionally when airplaying to a TV, for PIN codes for instance. It sometimes makes it difficult to provide remote help to novice family members, because you have to guess what they’re seeing.

Samsung has shipped a similar feature for phones and tvs for many years. Tech suppory can not connect randomly, the customer has to manually approve by entering a key. similar to how teamviewer does it.

> PS I also learned that Apple techs can essentially "VNC" into your phone and view things, change settings etc.

I'd love to be able to do that too when troubleshooting my mom's iPhone over a voice call (or trying to).

I want Apple to never make this available to 3rd parties. I wonder if, and hope, MDM can disable this support function too.

You kinda already can: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/teamviewer-quicksupport/id6616...

I really want this for my parents who live two states away.

Fire up the built-in Screen Sharing app, type their Apple ID email address in and hit connect. It should bring up a prompt their end that they can accept and you can then observe/control their screen!

I use this all the time for tech support (for family and work).

IOS?

Facetime supports screen sharing: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212734

I did this just yesterday with my dad. Super convenient for ‘family tech support.’

"Why do you always have to tinker!?!"

I'm sure you got an asswhooping. haha

As he should've.

Phones are individual/personal.

Even if the iCloud account is on a shared plan, and one member of the family is responsible for managing it, they should not be making changes to any INDIVIDUAL device settings without checking with that device owner.

I would be livid if my partner had done that for me because they "thought 'we' probably didn't need it, so I turned it off for 'your' iPhone"

I accidentally closed my wife’s tabs once.

She didn’t say anything.

But I’m not doing that again.

Well, if it was an accident, you might do it again. Accidents happen, and there's no point getting mad at a partner for being careless, unless they consistently demonstrate a lack of conscious awareness your interests/needs.

But OP's sounded like an optimization decision and would require some process retrospective.

>> She didn’t say anything.

> there's no point getting mad

>> But I’m not doing that again

> consistently demonstrate

So, for example, by not saying anything instead of getting mad. And by leaving the other person’s devices to their own management.

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