gkoehler's blurblog

Why Developers Shouldn’t Use iCloud Syncing, Even if It Worked by John Gruber
Thursday March 28^th, 2013 at 10:29 AM

Brent Simmons, again:

Here’s the thing: half the mobile revolution is about designing and building apps for smartphones and tablets.

The other half is about writing the web services that power those apps.

How comfortable are you with outsourcing half your app to another company? The answer should be: not at all comfortable.

Don’t take Brent’s word for it. Consider Tim Cook’s doctrine: “We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make.”

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4 public comments

gkoehler

4054 days ago

Yep.

satadru

4055 days ago

The alternative to own and control is of course, be able to modify it as needed.. hence the usefulness of open source and a permissive open source license...

New York, NY

jtsnyc47

4054 days ago

Useful to .0001% of the population, hence the market success of the FSF movement in general.

satadru

4054 days ago

But Brent Simmons is a developer, and he's talking about having control of the technologies one is dependent upon. And because of that rationale, open source unix is extremely successful. "Of the 1.07 billion consumer computing devices shipped in 2012, Google Android took a 42% market share." And Android is not only open source, but it is run on top of linux, which is also open source. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Summary ) And that doesn't even count embedded devices, where linux reigns supreme...

jtsnyc47

4054 days ago

Android is open source? LOL. http://www.tested.com/tech/android/2693-why-critics-claim-android-os-isnt-really-open/

satadru

4054 days ago

Commercial openness is always a battle between competing interests. I'd dare say it has gotten more open in the two years since that last article. And you won't find iOS on that list at all...

jtsnyc47

4054 days ago

Even though it's also based on Unix, which is heavily drawn from Linux? A slippery slope, my friend.

satadru

4054 days ago

iOS and OS X are based upon a mach microkernel with a (fairly dated at this point) FreeBSD userland, which is BSD licensed. But the last 4 or 5 versions of OS X have gotten more and more closed. The NeXTStep based UI has never been open source, in contrast to the UI on android which is open source. Reimaginings of Android, such as Cyanogenmod, MIUI, Amazon's Android OS or even the new Firefox mobile OS are impossible using the code that is available for iOS. Which is why all of those OSes are built on Android and linux and not on iOS.

spudicus

4054 days ago

I think that there are potential problems with any cloud service that are not mitigated by open source. Unless I am running my own servers, I am relying on a third party for data storage and remote functionality and as the situation with Google Reader has proven, that can go away at any time. Thankfully google made it simple to retrieve my feed data.

steingart

4050 days ago

I think you're conflating control with open. iCloud isn't a good solution because it only works with one platform. AWS isn't open, it's just agnostic. Amazon does all sorts of stuff behind the scenes, god knows what. But it works with everything.

satadru

4050 days ago

Good point.