iCloud for Developers (opens in new tab)

In the iCloud world, a user pays for his storage space directly to Apple. That will be an interesting shift for startups. There will be no backend expenses on a per user basis.

How to monetize the user is still wide open, but Apple will be covering the storage and server tab. (With money added from heavy users. Casual users needn't pay.)

The dark side of this is that there doesn't appear to be a way for a browser or non-Apple product to interact with the stored data. So you trade free backend servers for writing software only for Apple customers and even then not when they sit down at a borrowed machine.

I wrote an iOS app using Core Data and iCloud, and it was the worst experience I've had so far developing for the platform. From top to bottom, the Core Data concepts are simultaneously too low-level and too opaque. I found myself copying multi-page code snippets from the web and hoping they would work. Basic concepts like merging conflicts were obfuscated and brittle. Contrast that with Firebase, which has been a real pleasure to use.

So I'm hopeful that CloudKit will address these issues. Versioned schemas are great for updates but hard to get working initially. I'm sure iCloud has a lot of good ideas like that, but up till now they were simply too esoteric to get a handle on, and I think the general consensus was to avoid iCloud until it was ready for primetime.

They're discussing CloudKit now at WWDC. This sounds great - and could take a noticeable chunk of business from current cloud providers. This looks like a smart move from Apple. It only got about a minute and a half during the Keynote, ha.

CloudKit is very exciting.Appears to have a very narrow scope , IOS only App with a simple Web service. But for those developer looking to develop only for iPhone customers, it will be great to write all code with a single language and single platform on the client and server. This desire exist out there with web platform like node.js, that seek to united the discrepancy between the client and server development in mobile applications. Will love to try this out, and if work properly , free myself from azure/amazon EC2 in simple iOS apps.

Sounds like Parse but iOS only. It'll make things a hell of a lot easier for a lot of people though. I wonder what the procedure would be if your app takes off and you want to go cross platform.

Question: who owns the data stored with iCloud? Do developers still get to own their data, or is it going to be subject to sniffing from Apple?

I wonder who as a developer really loves more and more vendor lock-in than what we already have...? Where would you store your app data for your other platforms like Android or WP?

so from what I can see(and i did a very very cursory overview) , there are no web apis for icloud :( no cross platform integration i guess

iOS only. Parse it is then.