cloud my apps
John Gruber just posted a great piece, Cutting That Cord, concerning the state of cloud services for iOS. Certainly a topic of relevance in today’s mobile landscape. More and better cloud syncing services could bring our post-PC devices into the stratosphere in both usefulness and simplicity.
One of the four applications of cloud syncing that Gruber mentions, device backup, I see as a heavy handed solution. Any iOS user who has stumbled upon their device backup folder in iTunes knows it claims an unruly amount of space. Clearly, sending and receiving full device backups over the air is a bit beyond the reach of the state of bandwidth today. Gruber knows this: “It just isn’t technically feasible to have people backing up and restoring 32 or 64 GB of data to the cloud.”
But what is in those 64GB? Media, apps, and app data. Let’s break down the state of syncing for each of these.
Media
Photos, movies, and music regularly occupy the largest chunks of data on a mobile device. But these types of media already have some cloud solutions available, albeit imperfect ones. Rdio can help you ditch your music library. Netflix gets loads of video over the air. Photos can be pushed and pulled to services like Flickr. And there are other solutions on horizon. Amazon just recently released Cloud Drive, a service that seems awfully close to the oft rumored iTunes Locker.
Apps
You might need backup for Apps if you are trying to archive older versions, or if you want to hold back from updating. In that case, you’d presently be on your own to toy around with iTunes and save all those separate application bundles yourself. But technically, as all (legitimate) iOS apps are hosted on Apple’s servers, they are already backed up.
App Data
This is the biggest point of interest to me, and the one I’d like to speculate about. Currently, iOS app data generally lives in a documents folder inside the app bundle. There is no general filesystem access like on a traditional PC. Apple could solve a number of problems by simply allowing developers an API to synchronize this folder to those shiny new servers in North Carolina. Even a modest 20MB of storage would handle backup for a large percentage of apps. Moreover, if the API had notifications on when changes occur to that data in the cloud, they could enable developers to make simple syncing solutions for running their apps across multiple devices. This is a win on so many levels.
I feel like tackling the specific cases of backup individually can handle our leap onto the cloud much more smoothly than a bulky overreaching solution. As Gruber speculated, “…the iPad and iPhone won’t drop their connection to iTunes running on a PC in one fell swoop. It’ll be incremental…” And I think a solution for backing up data on the app level would really fit nicely into an incremental transition to the cloud.