In all seriousness, Apple may do certain things well, but cloud-anything just doesn't appear to be in its DNA. Maps, mail, iCloud, Timemachine, etc. Pretty much every service I can think of is laden with bugs, quirks, actual data loss risk, or is slow enough to be unusable. I'm not even remotely surprised that there is no "Apple search" yet.
They also run the App Store, Push Notifications, iAd, Apple News, Apple Music, Apple TV, Siri, Apple Pay and some of the largest systems for photo sharing, file storage, subscriptions, retail billing and more in the world. Saying Apple is bad at cloud services in general is incorrect.
They do have plenty of high-volume services e.g. Siri, Siri Suggestions, Maps, Online Store, Apple Music that haven't had any major issues. And even iCloud is substantially better now than in the early days.
Most of your issues seemed like the old, rehashed ones from nearly a decade ago.
Apple Maps is my goto because Google Maps just hates showing street names for some reason. Zoom in so a street takes up 100% of your screen and it still won't display the name many times.
Obviously that's not the only reason, haha, it's gotten surprisingly good a few years ago. Public transit and cycling is better in Google (though nothing beats CityMapper for transit if it supports your city). But for walking and driving Apple Maps is my winner.
I thought the same thing about Time Machine. It works really well with a local laptop that I plug in from time to time for this to work. However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?
Mail is definitely a local app, even if they did screw the pooch pretty badly with that gmail bug they had a few years ago.
“However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?”
No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data. Difference is that, with backups, you can get a copy back if you accidentally throw away a file. You typically also have multiple ‘old’ copies.
iWork apps (1) kind-of have backups in the form of versions that get synced to the cloud (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205411), but I think that’s implemented independently from iCloud’s syncing (You can use it to have multiple versions of a document locally, too)
> No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data
There’s literally a switch called “iCloud Backup” in Settings though. This isn’t a per-app data sync, it’s the full device restore that you can use if your phone gets stolen, dropped in the ocean, etc.
Although you should consider not using it for privacy reasons and running backups to a local machine instead, since last we heard Apple has the encryption keys and will happily hand the entire contents your phone to law enforcement given a warrant.
They have components that run in the cloud, and unfortunately, when I wrote "cloud services" I probably should have written "services that leverage the cloud."
I have a vague sense that you're right, that the services team just doesn't perform as well as other teams.
However, Apple operates many services at scales few companies ever reach, and doesn't seem to have outages much more often than those other few companies. So they're clearly doing a lot of things incredibly well, in the if-things-work-you-don't-notice sense.
They don't seem to emphasize their cloud services like Google does, and Apple charges for theirs at a much lower level than Google does, but I'm starting to think my vague intuition is wrong.
