| > "that you shouldn't work with it "even if it worked"" I simply have not seen this attitude at all on the internet. Everybody wants the promise of CDIS. All of the anger, frustration, and vitriol is around the broken promise of it, not the concept. > "and (this might be personal opinion) but I don't believe that they're too far from cracking it." That remains to be seen. There is a growing sentiment in the Apple dev community that Apple's QA quality is slipping, and slipping hard, and this has a large detrimental impact on developers. I was recently at a conference where this "joke" was made multiple times. Whenever someone commented that "X might be fixed in iOS7" someone would pipe up "Great, then we can use it when iOS8 comes out." The upgrade rate on iOS devices far outstrips Android, but even now, on the eve of iOS7, a good 15-25% of devices are still on iOS5. There is effectively a one-year gap between Apple coming out with new API, and being able to require the use of the API in your app (unless you feel like leaving up to a quarter of your userbase out). With things like CDIS this one-year gap is effectively lengthened to TWO years. Apple comes out with something new that's broken enough to be unusable in production. We wait another full year for them to finish baking it. And then we wait another year for the install base to be wide enough to ship an app with it. With CDIS this is coming up to be a FOUR YEAR GAP, assuming they make it production-stable in iOS7. There is plenty of reasonable skepticism when it comes to doubting whether CDIS will be fixed at all, or be quietly swept under the carpet as a failed technology. > "I've only seen 3-4 people who have lost access to their data completely" In my experience data loss has never been an issue - loss of iCloud connectivity is. Which is to say, once a conflict resolution failure occurs, that device is now an island - no changes made there will be communicated to any other device, and no changes made elsewhere makes it to that device either. And there is no way to restore this connection that anyone is aware of it. Data loss hasn't ever been a major problem here - when a breaking conflict resolution occurs Core Data's default behavior is to go all-local rather than delete data. The inability to repair a broken iCloud link is 100x more aggravating than simply breaking, since it means having to tell a user that they are SOL. By far the greatest frustration I've encountered re: CDIS is exactly this - that once it breaks, it's permanently broken. > "But in any case, my plan is to compile a list of all the issues I've experienced next, and maybe some of the hacks that I'm using to work around them, and do another write-up in the near future." I'm looking forward to it, though I remain extremely skeptical that Core Data is production-ready. I've now, collectively, been in rooms with literally thousands of angry CDIS developers. Very smart developers who have yet to be able to ship a single CDIS-enabled app because its stability is simply atrocious. I'm wondering how it is that your experience is so different from everyone else's - where you reportedly have CDIS working in a production app with few/no issues, while others can't even get their Core Data stores to stand up straight. That's a pretty huge gap in progress. |
- I referenced the Brent Simmons article and the Marco / Siracusa podcast early on in my post. They're all highly-visible and prominent members of the Apple dev community, and this was clearly their stance that I was challenging.
- Regarding upgrading, you can mark out certain features to be available on the latest version of iOS while maintaining general backward compatibility with the previous iOS version. My app is compatible with iOS5, but I don't expose the iCloud sync option to iOS5 users because I don't want them to use it. I've had 0 complaints about this policy.
> The inability to repair a broken iCloud link is 100x more aggravating than simply breaking, since it means having to tell a user that they are SOL. By far the greatest frustration I've encountered re: CDIS is exactly this - that once it breaks, it's permanently broken.
This isn't true. I encounter this problem fairly regularly with users, and the process I outline for them is this:
- turn off iCloud sync option from my app from all devices. This will make an object-by-object copy of 'ubiquity' sqlite db into their local sandbox
- nuke their container from Settings -> iCloud -> Storage and Backup -> Manage Storage -> Documents and Data -> Show All -> <my app> -> Edit -> Delete All. This cleans out their iCloud database and all metadata associated with it
- wait a few minutes for the delete to sync over to all devices
- choose one of the devices as the most recent 'truth' version, and use that to be the first device to sync up to iCloud
- connect second device to iCloud again, and this will fetch data from iCloud instead of uploading. Once done,from then on, sync will work again seamlessly across both devices.
The instructions have some nuance in them, but that's the gist of it. Resetting the iCloud container fixes almost all the problems that you would encounter with CDIS, and the hacks are around making backups and restoration of data as painless as possible, and trying to minimize data loss. Again, this adds customer service add-on, but it's far far from impossible.