What’s the point of iCloud Drive?

There are problems in quantum mechanics that I have solved with greater ease than answering the question, “What’s the point of iCloud Drive?”. Perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration (just a bit), but the point is Apple has not made their cloud storage solutions all that clear. A lot of people would agree with me when I say iCloud is a mess: there is photo stream, photo sharing, photo library, iCloud Drive, the generic term “documents and data” (formerly documents on the cloud), and desktop and documents sync.

At first glance even the names seem off-putting. By contrast, Dropbox has a more straightforward feature-set: selective sync and file backup, sharing and versioning. The term “iCloud” is a generic term that refers to cloud storage; the main function of this, as we will see soon, is more sync than storage. And right off the bat I feel the need to mention that iCloud is not — and cannot, in its current state, be thought of as — an alternative to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box etc.

We ought to start simple: say you have a bunch of photos on your iPhone that you want to share with someone else, then you use iCloud Photo Sharing. This lets you create an album and share that album via your iCloud — in which everyone has 5GB of space free — so the album then appears on the other person or persons or the public’s iCloud and is accessible through the Photos app on their device, whether on macOS or iOS, or a dedicated web link for those on Windows or those without Photo Sharing turned on. Continue reading

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