November 7, 2019

Apple Notes and iCloud Syncing: Breaking a Good Thing Badly

Warner Crocker on medium.com:

Each device had a different note count. The MacBook had three copies of the same note, two in the proper folder, one not. The iPad Pro had only the copy that had been Air Dropped. The iPhone Pro had two copies. Edits made to another note on the MacBook earlier in the morning had not synced to either of the two other devices.

I didn’t have time to blog about this, but I’m suffering this right now. By signing out of iCloud on the iPad mini I managed to get the critical Notes I needed for a work trip this week — but there’s 6 notes on the iPhone are not synching:

Notes Sync Fail

I think his closing says it best:

Look I get it. These are big complex systems and sometimes things need to be worked out. So, I’ll grant some leeway for that. But I also get this. Apple has more resources at its disposal than most other companies and it needs to figure this stuff out. It should be embarrassing, but apparently it isn’t embarrassing enough to martial enough of those resources to fix iCloud, which is a system that Apple is relying on more and more as the backbone for services that connect these devices.

I don’t want to rethink my Notes setup. But I have work to do.

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