11 vs 950: iCloud / OneDrive

I used iCloud from time to time with my old iPhone 4s. It wasn’t very good. The iPhone 11 iCloud is much worse than I remember. That could be misremembering.

The basic problem is that the contents of the cloud are inaccessible except when you do what Apple expect you to do. At least, I haven’t found my way around the presumptions.

Let me illustrate my problem. I took some photos on my iPhone. I wanted to transfer them to my iMac. I put them in iCloud. I went to my iMac. It saw nothing. I couldn’t find them, so I couldn’t put them in Aperture.

This may be because I have an old iMac which cannot upgrade from macos High Sierra, which is two editions of macos out of date (although it’s still receiving security patches).

So, on the iPhone, I saved the photos to OneDrive. It whinged, but it worked. I found the photos in OneDrive on the iMac. I imported them into Aperture.

This is ironic. Apple software doesn’t do what I want on Apple kit. Microsoft software does.

iCloud has the same bug as OneDrive, in that it presumes the internet is perfect and mobile phone data connections never break. In consequence, when I used iCloud to put an important document on my phone, then went to check the document when I was in an area with poor mobile connectively, I found that iCloud had lost the document. Since the document contained an address and a map, this was extremely irritating. OneDrive has the same bug. Fortunately for me, I’d learnt my lesson from the OneDrive bug, and saved a copy of the document elsewhere.

I can recommend neither OneDrive or iCloud for cloud activities on a phone, they both contain nasty bugs that make the products pretty unreliable. Still, if I have to suggest one, I’d suggest OneDrive: it’s actually usable.

Which phone is better: well, ironically, it’s a much of a muchness because Microsoft is on both phones.