Comment by NikolaNovak
1 month ago
I kinda was somewhat with you until this point.
Apple IS just another cloud provider / centralized backup service. It's not fundamentally different than others, and if you're not in select group of whatever the respectful term is for those who stay strictly inside apple ecosystem, you will have multiple clouds and multiple data sets and multiple backups that all interact with each other and your heterogeneous devices in unpredictable ways. Icloud will not help you with that any more than google cloud or Samsung cloud etc. They all want to own all of your stuff, neither is simply a hyper helpful neutral director.
The “fundamental difference” is that it’s better integrated with your device and can backup the internal state of your device and the apps.
Even if you use Microsoft Office or GSuite and save using the standard file picker, you can save to iCloud. iCloud has a native app for Windows and plug ins on Windows to sync browser bookmarks for Chrome, Edge and Firefox
And the alternative people are proposing are four or five self hosted solutions?
Again, I think there's an assumption of single device / ecosystem loyalty in your statement? I have an android phone and iOS phone and three android tablets and a bunch of laptops with various operating systems.
Iphone is "just another device". I don't feel Icloud is any better integrated with my Samsung note, than google is integrated with my iPhone - in fact, the opposite. Google, for example, CAN sync my photos across iphone and Android and windows devices. Whereas my wife knows the primeval scream from the home office every 6 months I try to claw photos out of apple's greedy selfish hands :-)
For people who JUST use iphone, sure, Icloud is the boss just like for people who JUST use e.g. Samsung galaxy the Samsung cloud is awesome. But that's not a high bar. I feel we are still lacking empathy here for people like original poster who may have more than one device in their lives.
And none of these can sync your bookmarks, iOS settings or store the internal state of apps on your iPhone.
And I wouldn’t have the same arguments if they weee using Google cloud. But they are concerned about “privacy” and trust Google?
But my argument is about people thinking that Apple or Google should care about the minuscule number of people who are hosting their own syncing services
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