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iCloud for Developers

developer.apple.com

99 pointsmetaedge25 comments

In the iCloud world, a user pays for his storage space directly to Apple. That will be an interesting shift for startups. There will be no backend expenses on a per user basis.

How to monetize the user is still wide open, but Apple will be covering the storage and server tab. (With money added from heavy users. Casual users needn't pay.)

The dark side of this is that there doesn't appear to be a way for a browser or non-Apple product to interact with the stored data. So you trade free backend servers for writing software only for Apple customers and even then not when they sit down at a borrowed machine.

Is storage that large a problem for most startups, though?

That's a complex question.

I think the shortest answer is "no.. but a small percentage of users use very large amounts which can end up as a problem".

> There doesn't appear to be a way for a browser or non-Apple product to interact with the stored data

What APIs do the iCloud.com web-apps use, then? ("Non-public ones" is the likely answer.)

They could be running on Apple hardware.

That was a serious suggestion. Was I downvoted because someone doesn't like the idea that Apple could be using Apple hardware to run their own stuff?

Amazon S3 has offered user-pays storage for years, for any client OS.

A cloud that cannot be accessed from everywhere and everything is not a cloud

Yes it is.

It's not an open cloud. I wasn't aware there was a strict definition.

The word cloud is a crock and i'm not going to get into that.

But the general point of people providing online service based applications is that from many front ends they have one back end. Having it locked down to a platform is utterly utterly pointless and pathetically purposefully divisive.

I really am quite sure the future of modern global interpersonal communications is utterly disastrous given the state of rival networks fighting it out instead of working towards inter-operable-fault-tolerant-distributed-vendor-agnostic solutions.

Email is still the best way of doing this but as Instant Messaging has shown for the past 20 years (no standard ever caught on) without that we end up unable to communicate reliably and one logical place with everyone. The only thing even close has been SMS.

> The word cloud is a crock and i'm not going to get into that.

I can't resist slightly getting into it: it was a perfectly decent metaphor until some marketing numbskull heard a technical person use it and decided to stretch it in ways that made it meaningless.

Back when it simply meant, "look, you push your packets into the network and a bunch of routers decide how to get it to its destination without you having to worry about routing" it was fine.

There's already a name for that: An IPv4/v6 network.

Indeed, that is exactly the correct term.

But as a metaphor: I think Jon Postel might have been the first person I heard use the term. I also feel like there was such a picture in some of the early IP documents (like the internet protocol transition handbook in the early 80s) but that stuff I had on paper and it's stuck in a box someplace.

Regardless, it's been horribly abused by marketing people and does need to be dragged out back and put down.

I wrote an iOS app using Core Data and iCloud, and it was the worst experience I've had so far developing for the platform. From top to bottom, the Core Data concepts are simultaneously too low-level and too opaque. I found myself copying multi-page code snippets from the web and hoping they would work. Basic concepts like merging conflicts were obfuscated and brittle. Contrast that with Firebase, which has been a real pleasure to use.

So I'm hopeful that CloudKit will address these issues. Versioned schemas are great for updates but hard to get working initially. I'm sure iCloud has a lot of good ideas like that, but up till now they were simply too esoteric to get a handle on, and I think the general consensus was to avoid iCloud until it was ready for primetime.

Although there's a lot of boilerplate to get CoreData working I've always found it really good to work with. My guess would be that this iCloud developer stuff builds on top of CoreData so I wouldn't expect much to change unfortunately.

They're discussing CloudKit now at WWDC. This sounds great - and could take a noticeable chunk of business from current cloud providers. This looks like a smart move from Apple. It only got about a minute and a half during the Keynote, ha.

CloudKit is very exciting.Appears to have a very narrow scope , IOS only App with a simple Web service. But for those developer looking to develop only for iPhone customers, it will be great to write all code with a single language and single platform on the client and server. This desire exist out there with web platform like node.js, that seek to united the discrepancy between the client and server development in mobile applications. Will love to try this out, and if work properly , free myself from azure/amazon EC2 in simple iOS apps.

Sounds like Parse but iOS only. It'll make things a hell of a lot easier for a lot of people though. I wonder what the procedure would be if your app takes off and you want to go cross platform.

Question: who owns the data stored with iCloud? Do developers still get to own their data, or is it going to be subject to sniffing from Apple?

Unlike some other companies (FB, Dropbox, Google) Apple's business model doesn't depend on sniffing your personal information.

And more importantly, how do you export your data and move it to a different provider? How do you take your app that relies on CloudKit and make it cross platform? If the answer is "you can't, this is only meant to help the Apple ecosystem", I'm not sure of the broad usefulness of this.

Why would Apple care about your data? They do not make money off ad sales, they make money off platform adoption.

A private and secure platform results in more adoption.

I wonder who as a developer really loves more and more vendor lock-in than what we already have...? Where would you store your app data for your other platforms like Android or WP?

so from what I can see(and i did a very very cursory overview) , there are no web apis for icloud :( no cross platform integration i guess

iOS only. Parse it is then.

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