Friday, January 14, 2011

State of Sync

Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer looks at various ways they could have implemented syncing for Things. To my knowledge, Apple has never said why Sync Services is not available to third-party developers on iOS (via either MobileMe or USB). Lots of developers are either reinventing the wheel or waiting to see what Apple does.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

Steve Kalkwarf

I've seen .Mac sync sessions crash due to exhausted address space on the Mac. Given the RAM (and no VM) limitations of iOS devices, I'm not at all surprised SyncServices is not available on iOS devices.

Sync Services also has one fatal flaw beyond lack of iOS support: MobileMe costs money. People don't necessarily want to pay $99 a year for sync. It's ok if they have it, but a minority of Mac users do.

@Steve Kalkwarf Indeed, although it seems like it should be possible to implement Sync Services in a less RAM-hungry way. I hope Apple is working on this anyway because, as you say, the limitations affect the Mac as well.

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