| There are a lot of alternatives to iCloud. Most of them are just backend-as-a-service, but some of them are really sync engines. Dropbox has been around a long time, and is really popular for iOS file sync. My team at Couchbase has been building mobile NoSQL databases that sync[1], for a number of years now, and our tech is used by a few apps in the app store already.[2] This preamble is to say that I've had plenty of conversations with developers who would be in iCloud's target market but decided not to use it. And the big reason they won't use it has very little to do with the reliability and user experience problems that keep coming up in the critiques of iCloud. The big reason they don't use it, is that they need to control their data. It's one thing for a small game or journaling app to outsource data management to Apple, but an entirely different thing for medical apps, enterprise sales, or other "serious" apps to do that. Perhaps in the long term Apple will offer an enterprise version of iCloud that you can run on your own terms. But until that happens, most serious apps are going to want to run their own infrastructure. BTW all the code we write is open source, so if you are interested in sync capable databases with offline and p2p support, join us. [3] [1] https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios
[2] https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-iOS/wiki/TouchDB-In...
[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase |