Apple's Broken Promise: Why Doesn't iCloud 'Just Work'?

Frustrations mount as developers deal with Apple's inability to manage another cloud service

iCloud, perhaps more than any Apple software product, is meant to "just work." When Apple introduced iCloud, it made clear its hopes to eradicate settings menus and file systems in favor of automation. Steve Jobs pledged to do a better job than he did on MobileMe, Apple’s notoriously horrible stab at web services a few years ago. With iCloud, changes you make to documents on your computer show up instantly on your iPhone and vice versa. "It just works," Jobs exclaimed when he first demoed the service in 2011. "Everything happens automatically," Jobs continued, "and it’s really easy to tie your apps into iCloud’s storage system."

Nearly two years later, customers demand iCloud integration more than ever from third-party developers, but it’s a total mess to implement. "iCloud hasn’t worked out for us," wrote Daniel Pasco, CEO of development studio Black Pixel this past week. "We spent a considerable amount of time on this effort, but iCloud and Core Data syncing had issues that we simply could not resolve." Pocket lead developer Steve Streza piled on with a cutting tweet: "Remember that @blackpixel has many of the brightest people in Cocoa development. If they couldn’t get iCloud working, who can?"