Apple Heads To The Cloud

At WWDC last week, Apple announced some interesting enhancements to iOS and OS X, but none quite as interesting as their first real move to the cloud, iCloud.  iCloud allows users to save data, documents, music, movies, and photos to the cloud.  It also allows for contact, calendar, and mail syncing between devices.  It’s tightly integrated with iOS and Mac OS X. 

As with all Apple products, iCloud is very easy to use when you’re on an Apple product.  Developers are being given a rich set of API’s for iOS and Mac OS X Lion that will allow them to build applications that seamlessly store data in the cloud.  The end user may not even know they are using iCloud.

While this tight integration is nice, it brings up a core issue of Apple’s model, which is the lock into the Apple ecosystem.  When I think of the cloud, I think of a system that allows me to access my information anywhere, not just on devices made by one company. And as a developer, I would like my cloud solution to be available to everybody, not just people that own one brand of product. 

Another issue I find with iCloud is that it doesn’t seem to do anything that hasn’t been done before. Currently we use Amazon, Google, or even Salesforce.com for storage in the cloud. All of these provide robust API’s that work across a wide range of platforms. I haven’t seen the same from iCloud. The tight integration is nice, but it doesn’t appear to be superior to Google’s integration with Android.

I am happy to see Apple’s entry into the cloud space. I think it helps show that the cloud is a strong idea for the future of computing. I think it will be a great tool for iOS and Mac OS X developers as it opens up options for how to store data to sync to multiple devices. However, I don’t feel it is a real contender to Google or Amazon in this space. The cloud should be a place I can store data, files, or whatever my application needs, and make it available to every device easily, no matter who the manufacturer is.