Apple is making an aggressive move this year to ensure iCloud is secure for the future, at WWDC they announced iCloud Drive to store documents and folders and send them over from Mac to Windows to iOS, similar to Google Drive with Mac tagging and full integration with iOS.
When Apple originally designed MobileMe, the goal was to offer a solution to arising problems on the PC and mobile, but the suite didn’t work out well and ended with Steve Jobs firing a lot of the staff involved and creating iCloud, a more complete cloud service.
Apple iCloud has not faired well against other cloud solutions, while Apple touts 320 million users, we know that most users don’t use iCloud storage regularly and have no incentive to really save folders and content onto iCloud, mostly used for backups on the device.
Syncing photos across devices in now automatic now and works through iCloud. Apple is making a big deal on people taking “thousands” of photos and not being able to store them, offering iCloud as a premium and proper solution that has advantages to internal storage.
iCloud Drive Pricing
On the consumer end, Apple has dropped prices of iCloud drastically, offering 20GB for $0.99 a month and 200GB for $3.99 a month. Compare that to Dropbox, which offers 200GB for $19.99 a month, it is not even in the same league, although Google Drive offers competitive pricing at $1.99 for 100GB and 1TB for $9.99.
Apple is not just pushing iCloud for consumers, CloudKit was announced for developers as a “effectively free” developer framework that allows xCode developers to tap into the abundance of iCloud storage. The amount of storage scales with the amount of users on the app and Apple has terabytes of storage to offer.
This might put developers off using third party solutions to host their server side platform, like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. This move by Apple puts them in the enterprise business, something they held off from with Steve Jobs running the business.
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