[coldtea]

>Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services

Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service.

I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency ISP.

They're "slow" and "frequently unavailable" compared to what? Is the experience of bying stuff from the Google Play store any better? Is the experience of buying music off of Amazon any better? (I'm not talking about Open vs Close, and other philosophical stuff -- I'm asking about what you claimed here, e.g that it's "slower").

[kalleboo]

> I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself.

iTunes and the App Store are way slower than the typical web sites I browse (including other stores such as Amazon). I also have problems with them sometimes just not loading at all (white pages). And this is on LTE or 100 Mbit WiFi.

As a developer, you tell the App Store is janky since you can literally see the propagation of your app updates before your own eyes. Sometimes the "update" button shows up before the update is actually available (and the app store redownloads the same version), sometimes the update is available in search results before the app information page, some times the update push notification comes first, not to mention replication geographically and across the different country stores. It's first an hour after your update is released that the app store is consistent. It's pretty tolerable now, but it used to be way worse and would take up to 10 hours - we'd get complaints from users due to all the failed updates when the store was inconsistent. We still get complaints on new app releases for random "this product is not available" errors for the first couple hours.

[thrownaway2424]

Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes before the iPad thought it was sufficiently buffered to begin playback. That was on my local 5GHz 802.11n backhauled over 100mbps cable. Every time I want to watch something on Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, or Google Play they all start more or less instantly.

I would argue that Google also has a superior app store buying experience, in at least one aspect, that I can use any web browser to install apps onto any of my phones, the usual example being I can install an app on my phone by selecting it in Chrome on my iMac.

As for the rest of their cloud, the "frequently unavailable" thing I am referring to is APNS, which seems to suffer from complete unreachability at least quarterly. This seems to have something to do with their flailover from their east coast to their west coast datacenter.

[eridius]

> Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes...

That video was almost certainly coming from a CDN. If you were experiencing connection difficulties to that CDN, I'm not so sure you can claim that's Apple's fault.

[thrownaway2424]

Using a 3rd party doesn't absolve the first party of responsibility for customer experience. In the iTunes case, the experience was bad, and incongruous with the rest of the iOS experience, which is usually good. That's why I reach for my iPad instead of my Nexus 7 more often than not, because I don't have time to waste on Android bullshit (and anyway, usually the Android's battery is dead). But if I pay for a TV show and then can't watch it until 40 minutes later, that's a terrible experience and it put me off iTunes for TV shows, forever.

[eridius]

One single bad experience which could have just as easily been caused by your ISP, or even by you (e.g. by using a DNS provider that interacts badly with CDN geolocation), turns you off forever from a service that otherwise acts better than its competitors? That's a rather extreme statement to make.

Besides, do you really think the competing services don't have the same potential for problems with whatever delivery network they're using?

[thrownaway2424]

Netflix and Amazon have a different failure mode where they deliver lower picture quality in order to maintain faster-than-real-time delivery. In the case of Amazon, when this happens you get an email within a day refunding the difference between the HD and SD quality stream, if you paid for the HD one. A very good experience.

[eridius]

You consider that a good experience? I hate it when I get a low-quality stream from Netflix. I actually would prefer to be able to force it to buffer the HD stream, even if that means waiting a bit before I start watching.

[MAGZine]

> a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people

Someone unwilling though, yeah? Lots of people I know don't turn on iCloud, and are annoyed with the iTunes implementation.

> and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service.

But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Google Music, among others) except BUY a streaming service with poor adoption.

I think the Open/Close part is part of the reason why Apple's services pale in comparison.

As for speed, I would be very surprised if Apple had better service than Google or Amazon, as these companies are much more invested in the Web than Apple.

[coldtea]

>Someone unwilling though, yeah? Lots of people I know don't turn on iCloud, and are annoyed with the iTunes implementation.

I don't know how many are those that don't "turn it on". Hundreds of millions DO use it. And it's only getting better (e.g see recent WWDC changes).

Those "annoyed" perhaps don't remember how phones were before iCloud, iTunes Backup. I had Sony and Nokia smartphones and it was dreadful. Even now, there's not much to write home about in the way Android handles backup/sync compared to iCloud.

>But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Google Music, among others) except BUY a streaming service with poor adoption.

Except? I think it's enough of a bold move, and surely is not "nothing". Plus, iTunes Radio (which didn't get much love from Apple) already had more people than Spotify (almost twice as much).

>As for speed, I would be very surprised if Apple had better service than Google or Amazon, as these companies are much more invested in the Web than Apple.

It's not like that it takes anything special to get speed on the web. It's not rocket science. Apple uses Azure for a lot of its services, which is equivalent to AWS/Amazon.

[gress]

Can you explain why anyone would not turn on iCloud backups for their device?

[TheOtherHobbes]

Privacy concerns. Speed. Efficiency. Mobile data costs.

[coldtea]

Well, the backup can be encrypted. It also doesn't use "mobile data" (over wi-fi). And speed and efficiency, I never had any problem with.

Any comparable service doing it better? Because those are general concerns, nothing special about iCloud.

[gress]

Noting that those are just dimensions, and not an explanation, is there any better alternative on any handset along any of those dimensions? (also icloud backup doesn't use mobile data)