[zulfishah]

> 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.

- 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.

[potatolicious]

> "- nuke their container from Settings"

This is the part that's news to me - I've observed myself and corroborated with many other devs that nuking a container prevents the container from being recreated by that app ID ever again.

This really is the one big sticking point - if nuking containers actually worked properly the scope of the problem is greatly reduced. Sure, potential data loss, but at least your devices start talking again.

I'd be interested in seeing code, but this is definitely something outside of your app. Very curious. I was very recently in a room full of CDIS devs who complain that the above is still broken in iOS 6.1.3, and I'm at a loss as to how you've been able to achieve successful recreation of an iCloud container that has been deleted via Settings.

[zulfishah]

Nuking a store works great; always has, even with iOS5 actually. And 'nuking' I mean specifically going into settings and doing a Delete All. If you delete the root ubiquity folder in Mobile Documents using Finder, then yes, you're never going to be able to use that ubiquity container again.

After nuking a store and waiting a few minutes (ideally restarting your device as well), the container is just as good as new. You can try it out with a basic CDIS app yourself and see.

[potatolicious]

That's the news part - I'm not talking about deleting the ubiquity container. Ever since iOS5, and even in iOS6, my experience - and the experience of every developer I've ever run into using CDIS - is that deleting a container via Settings -> iCloud -> Manage -> {appname} -> Delete All results in a permanent breakage.

I'm not calling you a liar - I'm quite confident it works fine for you, but I'm wondering how our experiences can be so different. This isn't just me, this is literally confirmed by entire room fulls of people who've been wrestling CDIS for months.

I'm baffled.

[ejdyksen]

Just to chime in: I use this all the time in testing, and it's never failed on me. You have to do the right thing in your app to watch for these changes and gracefully reset and all, but I've nuked the container (from Settings->iCloud, on Mac and iOS) dozens of times now and never had permanent breakage of any kind.

Occasionally, after doing this, it'll appear to take much longer to provision a new ubiquity store (sometimes minutes, which is unacceptable), but never actually broken.

[zulfishah]

It's not just me. You can go through a lot of the threads on devforums.apple.com, in the iCloud section, and you'll hear the same thing. The solution to almost all problems is using the Delete All hammer. It's just an unpleasant solution, but definitely fixes the problem and lets you start fresh.