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Apple is facing a near-£3bn lawsuit over claims it breached competition law by effectively locking millions of UK consumers into its cloud storage service at “rip-off” prices.

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[-] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 44 points 20 hours ago

Would be cool if this results in being able to store the Photos library in Nextcloud. Not holding my breath though.

[-] Luckyfriend222@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

You can already set up your photos to automatically save in Nextcloud? With Nextcloud sync client’s auto-upload feature? I have photos on phone and Nextcloud only.

[-] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 hour ago

Meeeeh, that sucks though compared to iCloud. I haven’t tried it but it seems like it will upload only and not download, and it will not store the entire Photos database (including faces, etc.).

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 32 points 20 hours ago

They are a TRILLION DOLLAR company. They aren't flinching.

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago

Not getting it. There’s nothing stopping you from storing your photos in Amazon Photos, or Google photos, or Dropbox, or whatever.

[-] kayazere@feddit.nl 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

It’s also not just about photos. If you want to do automatic backup of your phone you can only do that with iCloud. Otherwise you have to connect your phone to a computer and do a manual backup with iTunes/Finder. Apple even killed off automatic local wifi backups by forcing you to enter your unlock code every time you trigger a backup via iTunes/Finder.

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 55 points 19 hours ago

This is false. Apple OS's contain numerous blockers and friction points that not only stop users from storing much of their data in other clouds, but prevent competitors from being able to develop them at all. Apple does this via elevated privileges/processes and proprietary API's available ONLY to Apple's own local apps and cloud servers, for example:

- If you backup your photos to iCloud, everything happens in the background with elevated priviliges and "just works".

- If you backup your photos to ANY other provider, they run in a separate sandboxed process which doesn't "just work" because the OS can kill it at any time, meaning users often need to leave 3rd party apps open for their photos to sync at all.

This is the same for every 2nd/3rd party service in comparison to Apple/iCloud across Apple OS's. Nobody can develop a true competitor for anyone who purchased Apple hardware as Apple has access to a range of processes, services, and API's which are not available to external developers. You can't boot up an iphone and set Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3 as your authoritative cloud data or backup provider. You must use iCloud, or you get an inferior experience – not because of any technical limitation, but specifically because Apple designed non-Apple integrations to be inferior.

[-] Virkkunen@fedia.io 8 points 14 hours ago

From the top of my head, you need to keep those apps open in the foreground if you want to sync your photos/files, while iCloud does it automatically on the background for you, showing that iCloud has an unfair advantage over the rest.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 29 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Except the API non-neutrality.

Only Apple applications are allowed to operate in the background. Element (Matrix chat application) actually had to disable its app showing up in the share context menu because the encryption method breaks when it was used.

I don't know what features Apple photos or files have, but other apps wouldn't be able to do background downloads (downloading files added to a folder by another device,) on-device photo digestion (apple photos classifies what is in your photos and what text is in them in the background for privacy reasons,) and similar things.

Edit: and yes I know that there's a background refresh toggle, but it doesn't work. It just straight up doesn't work. That feature is entirely up to the OS when it wants to schedule that "background refresh". In my experience it never does.

Edit 2: Also, only Apple storage integrates directly with the photos app and files app. And that only one comes preinstalled.

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago
[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 18 hours ago
[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

It’s strange that there would be so much documentation for an API that reportedly doesn’t work. Including a 2019 WWDC session explaining how to run in the background for more processor intensive tasks.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/707

There’s even a recent step by step post on Medium explaining how to implement short or long background tasks. Doesn’t say anything about it not working.

https://medium.com/@dbabic_38867/background-tasks-on-ios-c27366723b6d

If it really doesn’t work then I’d imagine the lawsuit will be won handily. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of this.

[-] kalleboo@lemmy.world 10 points 16 hours ago

If you check the forums, Apple Engineers say that background tasks typically only run overnight https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/654424

People syncing their photos to the cloud expect them to sync pretty much instantly if the battery isn't low (which iCloud will do)

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world -3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

That doesn’t say the API doesn’t work. That says the API that dev chose is for when your device is going to run heavy background tasks (processing). This API is designed to run when the device has plenty of battery or is plugged in and isn’t doing anything else. That’s not unexpected, nor is it any different from Apple apps (you don’t want spotlight indexing or photo recognition to fire when you’re low on battery or in the middle of playing a game).

Uploading photos isn’t a heavy background task. There’s gotta be a way to do upload it as you take the photo. And I’d think sending new photos to an app would be done by a push notification or would work similar to receiving new emails in the background from the many third party mail apps that do this.

Again, I want to see what the suing devs claim and what Apple counters with.

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

Literally no photo apps sync in the background. Apple is a trillion dollar company who wield a monopoly over their users computers and data, and you are defending them. Your defense enables enshittification, and capitalisms exploitation of consumers.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 17 hours ago

I had an older phone and only a couple apps that would need it. I think it intentionally didn't schedule anything to save power because the phone "can't handle it" anymore.

this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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