For one, iCloud wasn’t even natively enabled on OS X at first: Apple had to ship a software update to Lion – 10.7 was released in July 2011 – to bring official iCloud support to the desktop. Launched to much acclaim with iOS 5 in October 2011, iCloud immediately appeared as a fantastic solution to keep personal data in sync between iOS devices, but a more complex technology for third-party integration. While that has been (partially) the case, 409 days later the results are more nuanced.įor developers, iCloud integration didn’t quite go as planned. I concluded last year’s edition of My Must-Have Mac Apps suggesting that, with iCloud approaching its public debut and developers starting to integrate native sync in their iOS and OS X apps, “a new class of Mac software” would take us in new directions.
