Why is so hard iCloud? A bad UX use case
Correctly configuring iCloud is an odyssey for the base user. iCloud Drive is inexplicably confusing. The promise of simplifying experiences with switching from iPhoto to Photos for Mac has turned out to be exactly the other way around: now the user is much more confused.
Little by little, users switch to alternative services. The “we defend privacy” excuse is no longer valid with such glaring failures.
It pains me a lot to say it, but from the point of view of UX, iCloud is a real disaster today. Seeing impotence in icloud users who do not understand the service is common today. And more and more, they eventually left a service to a great degree of bewilderment and disappointment.
The most common problem on iPhone:
All Apple users get 5GB of free iCloud storage. The reason most people use iCloud storage is to get extra space to store data. However, iCloud storage can get full too. And if we include the backup copies it will take very little time to see these messages.
What exactly could be the reasons for iCloud backup storage being full? Most people believe that they can keep storing data in iCloud regardless of their backup activities. However, everyone is allocated 5GB of free iCloud storage space, and once you have used up your gigabytes, you will start to see messages like “your iCloud storage is full”, “not enough storage space”, etc.
Whatever the reason your backup storage is full, you must find a way around it or you risk losing your important data if you lost your iPhone.
At this point, a user with an iPhone finally pay for the icloud service. But this is a patch to the problem, not a solution because sooner or later you will have the same problem again. And it’s not funny when this happens. Mainly because it is no longer a free service, you are already immersed in a monthly service payment.
Real user feedback:
The advantages that iCloud offers in terms of information synchronization are lost with the disadvantage of the space and rates they offer. When you pay for a service like this, what you hope is to be able to forget about these problems, but far from this you have constant warnings and notifications (true spam) so that you can expand your contract to a larger space (how could it be otherwise with the base of service they offer). In short: if you want to continue paying more, at least it is because you are fully aware that what you like is not what you need, but other things.
The solution
At this point we have to go to others services. It could be perfectly Google Drive, Dropbox, Google Photos, etc … but from my own experience I think it is best to do a combination of several. Not only for price, but for optimization in terms of time and effort. If you only use Google Drive you will have to upload the photos selecting them one by one or in batches. If you use Dropbox it will synchronize the photos perfectly, but many of the files you will have to upload manually. It is the same case with google photos, only the automatic upload is already discontinued.
The perfect combination:
The flow:
1. It is advisable to do this flow once a week or every few days so that we do not accumulate much content to order. But of course, if you follow this routine, this message will never appear.
2. With the Dropbox app installed on our phone, we enable the “camera uploads” to do it automatically. We can say that it does it always, without having to open the app (it uses more energy when working in the background). We can even configure if we want to upload the photos only with wifi or always (mobile data/wifi). I personally have activated the option to only upload the photos when I start the app and only using wifi because I always do it from home at the end of the week/day.
3. Once I have verified that the process has been uploaded, I delete everything on the phone. I have already made sure that I have the backup in the cloud.
4. Here you are free to manage it however you want. You can move the content of “camera uploads” to the folders of your choice on Dropbox (or your local storage at your computer). In my case, as I am Google Drive user, I move the photos to google drive and order them according to my own criteria.
And this is it. As you can see it is something quite simple, that once you normalize it in your day to day routine you will save a lot of time and you get rid of headaches of problems with iCloud.
Hope it has fit.
Peace.
