[smackfu]

It's interesting how the iCloud branding plays into this. Because Apple includes so many services under the umbrella term iCloud, it can lead to a very different impression of the service between the users and the developers. All the talk about "iCloud is broken" is about one specific part, Core Data syncing. The rest, like online backup and document syncing and calendars, seems to work most of the time. I actually saw some comments elsewhere along the lines of "iCloud works fine for me as a user, so it's probably just bad developers who can't get it to work, not any issue with Apple."

[asparagui]

Loosely, there are two iClouds, one for Apple apps and another that is 3rd-party developer facing. This article sums it up fairly well: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/03/27/which-icloud-actually...

[rada]

The rest, like online backup and document syncing and calendars, seems to work most of the time.

Those 3 things are broken as well. Lost all my data twice.

[crazygringo]

But only most of the time. Last week, my iPhone inexplicably deleted all the pages in my Notes application that I made in February 2013, around 20 of them. Fortunately, they're still there in my synced e-mail account, but there appears to be no way to sync them "back" onto my iPhone.

And then last month, syncing my iPhone with iTunes inexplicably deleted the 40GB of my music from my iPhone. I hadn't done anything differently from the hundreds (?) of other times I've synced. I just had to go one-by-one and re-check all the playlists I sync, and wait a few hours for all the music to be re-copied. But still.

As easy as Apple products are to use, I'm always afraid something is going to go horribly wrong, in a way I never was with PC's, for example -- they were harder to use, and did less, but you could at least be reasonably sure of what was going on behind the scenes.

[mikeash]

Even more than that, iCloud Core Data syncing appears to be so broken that approximately nobody is able to even ship an app that uses it. Thus, users are never exposed to the brokenness because it's so broken you can't give it to them.