iCloud

My colleague Bradley Chambers recently wrote that his single biggest disappointment with WWDC was that Apple made no move to announce an upgrade to the 5GB free iCloud tier.

One of our readers, Sahil Malik, made a wry comment on the $6,699 maximum cost of the new MacBook Pro:

I hope it still includes the free 5gb iCloud thing.

As his comment implies, the 5GB free tier is now nothing less than an embarrassment …

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Update: It appears the TechCrunch report is based on a misunderstanding. Post updated to reflect our own understanding of the position, including a statement made by Apple to us.

A reported change to the way iCloud data is stored for Chinese iCloud accounts has raised further concerns about the ease with which the government could access sensitive information.

TechCrunch reported that data has been moved to servers owned by China Telecom, a state-owned company – but that report appears to be based on a misunderstanding …

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The WWDC keynote has come and gone. Apple announced a lot of exciting changes to iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. I can’t wait to see what developers can do with all of the new APIs, and how these products are refined ahead of their fall releases. Be sure to stay on 9to5mac.com this summer to follow along with all of the changes.

There was one major disappointment for me, though. iCloud’s free storage tier remains unchanged at 5GB. When Apple debuted iCloud in 2011, they said this:

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I’ve used all of the major “folders that sync” services over the years. Dropbox was the original solution, but I’ve also used OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, and iCloud. They all have good points and weak points.

I’ve personally settled on iCloud Drive because it’s built into macOS and iOS, but it’s not without room for improvement. Here are four things that Apple needs to add to iCloud Drive in the very near future.

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Users have long complained about the lack of free iCloud storage that Apple offers, but now the company appears to be taking one step in the right direction. Now, when users choose to upgrade from the 5GB free tier, they will receive the first month of their new tier for free…

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Apple has just released a new open source project on Github. FoundationDB is described as “a distributed database designed to handle large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers”. The database system is focused on performance, scalability and fault-tolerance. Meaning projects that use the database for their backend are faster and less expensive to maintain.

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Following other news where Apple is complying with the GDPR, today the company outlines tools to help developers manage user data that is stored in iCloud.

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Apple has shared during its education event in Chicago today that student accounts through schools will now get 200GB of iCloud storage for free.

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The iOS Security Guide was updated last month to indicate that Apple is now using the Google Cloud Platform for iCloud storage. The company has long used Amazon’s S3 alongside Microsoft Azure, but a reference to the latter service has been replaced by one to Google’s cloud storage service …

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The European Union wants to be able to force US tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft to hand over electronic evidence across borders when investigating serious crimes. The proposed law would apply to any company that does business within Europe, no matter where its data centers are based.

Tech firms argue that such cross-border arrangements would ‘undermine consumer trust in cloud services’ …

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Apple announced last year that it was moving Chinese customer iCloud operations to China in an effort to comply with local laws, with the move officially taking place at the end of this month. Reuters today reports that among the information being are iCloud customer keys…

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Apple played a surprisingly big role in helping track down one the world’s worst spammers, according to an affidavit unsealed today and picked up by The Verge. According to the document, Russian spam king Peter Levashov was tracked down in large part due to his iCloud usage…

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Apple announced in a press release earlier today several new features to come with iOS 11.3, including new Animoji and health records in the Health app.

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While Apple yesterday warned Chinese customers that their data would be migrated to local servers managed by a government-owned company from the end of February, TechCrunch reports that some U.S. customers are also being caught up in the migration.

After talking to a number of users, we found that Apple has included iCloud accounts that were opened in the U.S., are paid for using U.S. dollars and/or are connected to U.S.-based App Store accounts in the data that will be handled by local partner Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) from February 28.

Apple’s terms & conditions for the transition provide an explanation for the apparent anomaly, while a support document offers a solution …

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Apple has today announced a date for when it will hand over operations of iCloud data services for residents of mainland China to GCBD. The change was announced last year so that Apple can comply with local laws. GCBD will manage a new Apple data center in China that will eventually store all iCloud data for Chinese customers.

Affected customers are now being notified about the transition which will start on February 28. Apple reassured users that the data will be protected by the same encryption standards as its current US policies and that no special backdoors will be created.

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