Some developers who use Apple's CloudKit have complained about an iCloud syncing bug for months; some are resorting to adding iCloud status pages to their apps
A number of developers are upset with an increasingly problematic iCloud server issue that is causing some apps …
MacRumorsJuli Clover
Context & Ripple Effects
CloudKit has been positioned as the low-friction way for small teams to ship synced apps since Apple opened a server API on the service in 2016, letting developers lean on iCloud instead of running their own backends. That bet is now fraying: a syncing bug in CloudKit's backend has intermittently broken third-party apps for months, and Apple only confirmed this week that a fix is rolling out.
Developers whose apps depend on CloudKit are absorbing the cost directly — fielding user complaints about failed syncs and shipping in-app status pages to explain outages they cannot see into or control.
Second-order effects
Every month of silent breakage erodes the core sales pitch of CloudKit over self-hosted backends, pushing at least some teams toward building or buying their own sync infrastructure despite the added operational burden.
Third-order effects
If Apple's cloud services keep failing opaquely while third parties compensate with their own monitoring, reliance on first-party SDKs becomes a structural risk developers price in — a governance gap between the platforms Apple mandates and the infrastructure quality it delivers.
The trend: As more indie apps stake their core functionality on Apple's cloud services, iCloud reliability is shifting from a consumer annoyance into a developer-platform trust problem.
Ok, there's clearly an issue going on with iCloud sync right now affecting a lot of users across many different apps. What's the best way to report this? Radar? I haven't made any changes to my app since October and users have just recently started reporting sync failures.
iCloud errors seem to have really increased over the last couple of days. Wonder how many devs have to add these for Apple to I don't know fix the problems or at the very least publicly acknowledge them. https://twitter.com/...
iCloud sync is randomly breaking: https://reverttosaved.com/... ^ A quick write-up on what's been going wrong for me and others with iCloud of late and — as it turns out — for far longer than people realised. This is not good.
Devs/users of iCloud: if you're having similar issues (random app sync failure; 503 errors), please drop me a line. This issue clearly needs bringing to light somewhere and somehow. https://twitter.com/...
This thing about iCloud losing data on random Apple IDs is crazy. Somehow it hasn't happened to mine (I'm sure I've now jinxed it...). All I can say is I'm glad I stopped trusting iCloud years ago when iCloud Drive repeatedly made duplicates of files and corrupted my git repos. h…
I hate to say this, but iCloud can't be trusted. It's disheartening because there has been improvements in the past couple of years. All of products that use iCloud will be getting the ability to backup its data. https://www.macrumors.com/...
iCloud Drive returns a 503 error (service unavailable) since Nov. and it's affecting all apps that use iCloud Drive. @AppleSupport has not done anything about this and more AppleIDs are being affect. The @GoodNotesApp is one of those: https://support.goodnotes.com/ ... @MacRumors…
@aoverholtzer ... I'm pretty sure it started with the release of the new OSs - actually, I am sure I started hearing of iCloud syncing problems with the betas. If I had to guess, I'd say they rewrote something on the client side.
You can only get away with hiding sync status & manual refresh buttons when your sync service works 100% of the time. So many of Apple's own apps are designed to sweep it all under the rug when things go wrong. I don't think that's a viable strategy, or role model, for indie apps
@ChristianSelig uh depends on whether you're relying on iCloud Drive or CloudKit. CloudKit lets you refresh at will. iCloud Drive was a train wreck that I bailed on very early in Broadcasts 😂
It's not just third party apps. A freshly added calendar appointment failed to sync, and then on retry, was deleted (!) because of an iCloud 503. That's unacceptable. @AppleSupport https://twitter.com/...
iCloud has languished for far too long in Eddy Cue's hands. It's long past time to give it to someone who has the time and passion for it, or at least just gives a damn. https://twitter.com/...
This is the kind of thing that causes users to lose confidence in your service for *years* after the bug is fixed. All developers are just humans mashing keys, but the bugs coming out of Apple (and the slow fixes) are still concerning. https://twitter.com/...
In my own apps, I was planning how to support and expose more-advanced features for iCloud sync right in the UI. Very much a work in progress that is now gonna be influenced by the ongoing discussion of iCloud service issues https://twitter.com/...