Apple’s arrogant cloud

I’ve been messing with the iPad Pro 9.7" again recently, mainly because it strangely reminds me a lot of using an old, simple computer with Windows XP. I feel almost nostalgic using the thing.

Like the days of Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player, Apple has a whole collection of apps that just make sense. Want to take notes? Use Notes. Want to listen to music? Use Music. Compared to the more complex macOS (not personally but just in the abstract) iOS is simple, and if you can unlearn really strange desktop OS it can have its own fluency and elegance, especially with more basic tasks.

There is one thing, though, that Apple really fucks up with iOS, and in 2016 it’s a biggie. As I’ve written before, iCloud sucks. While iOS feels fresh, iCloud feels so, so arrogant.

Apple’s whole cloud goal, from the offset, has been reduced friction. You login to iCloud once and then Apple magically controls and syncs your data. There’s no manual refresh settings, and very few options. Your notes? They’re in iCloud. Your music? It’s there too, even though theoretically iCloud is a brand which encompasses many different kinds of syncing.

But iCloud is still very bad right now. At first I thought Apple Music’s iCloud library was an outlier. Syncing a library of tens of thousands like mine is, obviously, not easy. There’s metadata, cover art, file matching, uploading and re-encoding. iCloud Music often feels broken, but I’ve given it the benefit of the doubt up until now. Sometimes you need to reboot the device for it to sync, but sometimes it works on its own. It’s strange, and awkward if you need it to update right this second, but fine in the long term.

More recently though, using the iPad Pro, I’ve been delving deeper into Apple’s ‘seamless’ but closed services. Google Docs doesn’t support split-view so I tried Notes for instance. But Notes has the same problems as Apple Music.

I made a note on my iPad and a few minutes later checked my iPhone. It wasn’t there. Despite being synced to iCloud it was almost like my other device was living in a completely different world.

With most other apps you would just prompt the service. Pull to refresh maybe. Apple knows better though. With Apple Notes if it doesn’t show up on it’s own you’re just left to wait until it does.

I respect Apple’s ambitions with iCloud, but little things like that are exactly why it can seem like such an arrogant, counterintuitive service.

And until iCloud actually becomes a seamless product, Apple should include more fallbacks when it fails.