A growing number of developers report persistent CloudKit connectivity issues that break iCloud syncing inside their apps.
It seems the problem has been ongoing since at least November. Many developers say they reported the situation to Apple but have yet to see improvements — or even a response in some cases.
iCloud syncing broken in third-party apps
“There’s clearly an issue going on with iCloud sync right now affecting a lot of users across many different apps,” tweeted indie developer Becky Hansmeyer on Monday. “I haven’t made any changes to my app since October and users have just recently started reporting sync failures.”
It turns out Hansmeyer is far from the only developer experiencing this problem. Many say they receive complaints from users who run into problems when attempting to perform tasks that use iCloud syncing.
“iCloud Drive returns a 503 error (service unavailable) since Nov. and it’s affecting all apps that use iCloud Drive,” tweeted MeanRaw. “@AppleSupport has not done anything about this and more AppleIDs are being affected.”
Paul Haddad of Tapbots, the developer behind the popular Tweetbot app, said on January 21, “iCloud errors seem to have really increased over the last couple of days. Wonder how many devs have to add these for Apple to I don’t know fix the problems or at the very least publicly acknowledge them.”
Apple keeps quiet
These are just some of the many (and ever increasing) reports from developers and users who have been running into iCloud sync issues for months now. And despite many of them reporting the problems to Apple, there is still no fix.
The problem proves particularly frustrating for developers because most users are unaware that this is an Apple issue — that only Apple can fix. So, developers are being lambasted and criticized for faults they have no control over.
Some developers have been told by Apple that the company is aware of the problem, and working to eliminate it. However, some were told this weeks ago. At this point, it remains unclear exactly how long it will take Apple to fix the issue.
