[banachtarski]

In all seriousness, Apple may do certain things well, but cloud-anything just doesn't appear to be in its DNA. Maps, mail, iCloud, Timemachine, etc. Pretty much every service I can think of is laden with bugs, quirks, actual data loss risk, or is slow enough to be unusable. I'm not even remotely surprised that there is no "Apple search" yet.

[paxys]

They also run the App Store, Push Notifications, iAd, Apple News, Apple Music, Apple TV, Siri, Apple Pay and some of the largest systems for photo sharing, file storage, subscriptions, retail billing and more in the world. Saying Apple is bad at cloud services in general is incorrect.

[jayd16]

The CDNs are fine, push and subscriptions are mercurial at best and you have no choice but to use, and Siri is an example of Apple's cloud weakness.

[stephenhuey]

Mercurial is certainly a step above the antics of Loki, so count your blessings!

[52-6F-62]

Ssssssssmokin'!

[threeseed]

They do have plenty of high-volume services e.g. Siri, Siri Suggestions, Maps, Online Store, Apple Music that haven't had any major issues. And even iCloud is substantially better now than in the early days.

Most of your issues seemed like the old, rehashed ones from nearly a decade ago.

[marmshallow]

Their cloud-based Notes App is simply killer. Sure, it’s a simple app but I have had a flawless experience on it.

Photos is pretty great too, but I’m not sure how it compares to other photo services.

[dmitriid]

And yet they forced you to upgrade all your operating systems an all devices you own with the last Notes update (was it iOS 13?) or you'd lose data.

[stephenr]

You wouldn't lose data. You wouldn't be able to access the new notes on the older devices.

[thetinguy]

Because old notes synced through CalDev which required an iCloud email address

[0xEFF]

Maps is a search problem and Apple Maps has gotten quite good. It’s my go to now after a decade of Google maps.

[squeaky-clean]

Apple Maps is my goto because Google Maps just hates showing street names for some reason. Zoom in so a street takes up 100% of your screen and it still won't display the name many times.

Obviously that's not the only reason, haha, it's gotten surprisingly good a few years ago. Public transit and cycling is better in Google (though nothing beats CityMapper for transit if it supports your city). But for walking and driving Apple Maps is my winner.

[ako]

It still lacks cycling, that is usually the reason fo me to open google maps on my iphone.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

As of the next iOS release that will no longer be the case

[ColoradoDev]

As long as you live in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, or Shanghai and Beijing.

[chipotle_coyote]

That's coming in iOS 14, evidently.

[ColoradoDev]

So I'm using iOS 14 and just tried to pull it up. It has a message stating "Cycling directions are not yet available in [my city]"

A quick google search to see if it was simply because of beta or there is a limited roll out, produced this:

>New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Shanghai and Beijing in China.

[spideymans]

Look for the arrival of cycling in Apple maps upon the release of iOS 14 in the upcoming weeks

[Polylactic_acid]

Just got an iphone last month and apple maps has worked perfectly every time for me. I'm not exactly a maps power user but I haven't seen an issue.

[xenospn]

I find maps much more pleasant looking than Google Maps, and that's a big deal for me.

[fomine3]

Lack of maps.apple.com is still problem for use it for primary map service.

[cromwellian]

define "good", the POI database is still woefully lacking outside the US.

[nardi]

You’re 2 for 4. Time Machine and Mail (separate from iCloud) are not cloud services.

[dylan604]

I thought the same thing about Time Machine. It works really well with a local laptop that I plug in from time to time for this to work. However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?

Mail is definitely a local app, even if they did screw the pooch pretty badly with that gmail bug they had a few years ago.

[Someone]

“However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?”

No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data. Difference is that, with backups, you can get a copy back if you accidentally throw away a file. You typically also have multiple ‘old’ copies.

iWork apps (1) kind-of have backups in the form of versions that get synced to the cloud (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205411), but I think that’s implemented independently from iCloud’s syncing (You can use it to have multiple versions of a document locally, too)

(1) Third-party apps can use this, too (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), but I wouldn’t know how commonly this is used

[wlesieutre]

> No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data

There’s literally a switch called “iCloud Backup” in Settings though. This isn’t a per-app data sync, it’s the full device restore that you can use if your phone gets stolen, dropped in the ocean, etc.

Although you should consider not using it for privacy reasons and running backups to a local machine instead, since last we heard Apple has the encryption keys and will happily hand the entire contents your phone to law enforcement given a warrant.

[banachtarski]

They have components that run in the cloud, and unfortunately, when I wrote "cloud services" I probably should have written "services that leverage the cloud."

[tonyedgecombe]

I don't think Time Machine does, everything I've seen is local to the machine or across your local network.

[matthewmacleod]

As far as I am aware, neither Time Machine nor Mail have any components that "run in the cloud".

[pwinnski]

I have a vague sense that you're right, that the services team just doesn't perform as well as other teams.

However, Apple operates many services at scales few companies ever reach, and doesn't seem to have outages much more often than those other few companies. So they're clearly doing a lot of things incredibly well, in the if-things-work-you-don't-notice sense.

They don't seem to emphasize their cloud services like Google does, and Apple charges for theirs at a much lower level than Google does, but I'm starting to think my vague intuition is wrong.

[happythought]

My impression from Twitter “new job” announcements in the last 6 months is that Apple has seriously ramped up its kubernetes staff.

[Razengan]

iCloud Mail and Photos have been nigh flawless for me for over 8 years now.