Apple is facing a near-£3bn lawsuit over claims it breached competition law by effectively locking millions of UK consumers into its cloud storage service at “rip-off” prices.
Would be cool if this results in being able to store the Photos library in Nextcloud. Not holding my breath though.
They are a TRILLION DOLLAR company. They aren’t flinching.
Not getting it. There’s nothing stopping you from storing your photos in Amazon Photos, or Google photos, or Dropbox, or whatever.
From the top of my head, you need to keep those apps open in the foreground if you want to sync your photos/files, while iCloud does it automatically on the background for you, showing that iCloud has an unfair advantage over the rest.
This is false. Apple OS’s contain numerous blockers and friction points that not only stop users from storing much of their data in other clouds, but prevent competitors from being able to develop them at all. Apple does this via elevated privileges/processes and proprietary API’s available ONLY to Apple’s own local apps and cloud servers, for example:
- If you backup your photos to iCloud, everything happens in the background with elevated priviliges and “just works”.
- If you backup your photos to ANY other provider, they run in a separate sandboxed process which doesn’t “just work” because the OS can kill it at any time, meaning users often need to leave 3rd party apps open for their photos to sync at all.
This is the same for every 2nd/3rd party service in comparison to Apple/iCloud across Apple OS’s. Nobody can develop a true competitor for anyone who purchased Apple hardware as Apple has access to a range of processes, services, and API’s which are not available to external developers. You can’t boot up an iphone and set Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3 as your authoritative cloud data or backup provider. You must use iCloud, or you get an inferior experience – not because of any technical limitation, but specifically because Apple designed non-Apple integrations to be inferior.
Except the API non-neutrality.
Only Apple applications are allowed to operate in the background. Element (Matrix chat application) actually had to disable its app showing up in the share context menu because the encryption method breaks when it was used.
I don’t know what features Apple photos or files have, but other apps wouldn’t be able to do background downloads (downloading files added to a folder by another device,) on-device photo digestion (apple photos classifies what is in your photos and what text is in them in the background for privacy reasons,) and similar things.
Edit: and yes I know that there’s a background refresh toggle, but it doesn’t work. It just straight up doesn’t work. That feature is entirely up to the OS when it wants to schedule that “background refresh”. In my experience it never does.
Edit 2: Also, only Apple storage integrates directly with the photos app and files app. And that only one comes preinstalled.
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Is this the feature you’re saying doesn’t work?
Yup
It’s strange that there would be so much documentation for an API that reportedly doesn’t work. Including a 2019 WWDC session explaining how to run in the background for more processor intensive tasks.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/707
There’s even a recent step by step post on Medium explaining how to implement short or long background tasks. Doesn’t say anything about it not working.
https://medium.com/@dbabic_38867/background-tasks-on-ios-c27366723b6d
If it really doesn’t work then I’d imagine the lawsuit will be won handily. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of this.
If you check the forums, Apple Engineers say that background tasks typically only run overnight https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/654424
People syncing their photos to the cloud expect them to sync pretty much instantly if the battery isn’t low (which iCloud will do)
That doesn’t say the API doesn’t work. That says the API that dev chose is for when your device is going to run heavy background tasks (processing). This API is designed to run when the device has plenty of battery or is plugged in and isn’t doing anything else. That’s not unexpected, nor is it any different from Apple apps (you don’t want spotlight indexing or photo recognition to fire when you’re low on battery or in the middle of playing a game).
Uploading photos isn’t a heavy background task. There’s gotta be a way to do upload it as you take the photo. And I’d think sending new photos to an app would be done by a push notification or would work similar to receiving new emails in the background from the many third party mail apps that do this.
Again, I want to see what the suing devs claim and what Apple counters with.
Literally no photo apps sync in the background. Apple is a trillion dollar company who wield a monopoly over their users computers and data, and you are defending them. Your defense enables enshittification, and capitalisms exploitation of consumers.
I had an older phone and only a couple apps that would need it. I think it intentionally didn’t schedule anything to save power because the phone “can’t handle it” anymore.
I don’t get it. I mean, their free tier is a bit chintzy, but I give 'em a dollar a month and get 50GB. You can get 2TB for 3 bucks. This hardly seems a ripoff.
For me (europe) it is:
- 2,99 = 50GB
- 9,99 = 2TB
Everyone with a family or social life has between 20-200GB photos and videos. Notice how there is no plan for 5,99 = 1TB. You either do not back up everything and pay 3€, or you pay a tener per month to have a cloud storage that is always 50-70% empty but still have to pay for.
I will be the first to leave Apple iCloud if there is a viable solution that works like apples own OS integration without jumping through hoops and losing albums and meta data
I don’t get it either, what does perceived affordability have to do with a “monopoly”?
It’s not the price that is the problem, it’s how iCloud is integrated into the device, in a way Apple don’t allow other cloud services to do. iCloud has access other apps simply do not, so they cannot compete fairly.
What? You can host your own nextcloud instance and use it in the files app as a storage location and have all the same “save to” and “Read from” actions for documents that iCloud has. I use that and smb shares regularly and the only apps that don’t work with it are the ones who choose not to implement the apis for it. How is it monopolistic if Apple’s 1st party apps and software only work with their 1st party storage offering while allowing anyone to use the system api’s to connect and access any other storage service they want? Is it just them complaining that you can’t backup photos to anything but iCloud (except you can, by plugging it into any computer locally)? I really don’t understand, legitimately.
except you can, by plugging it into a computer locally
That’s not even remotely close to being the same as the experience iCloud offers.
So don’t use iCloud and the photos app? What’s the problem here? There are plenty of third party camera apps and photo managers that could all use the same apis to access your directly integrated nextcloud storage the same way the photos app works. Hell, Plex offers automatic photo backups to your plex server! Y’all need to actually explain what this monopoly claim is in better detail. What am I not understanding here?
Having to regularly plug your phone into a PC to back up 100GB+ of photos and videos over a USB 2 connection is not even remotely the same as automatic backups to iCloud that you can then access instantly, at any time, anywhere.
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