{"id":47348,"date":"2025-04-08T14:26:21","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T18:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=47348"},"modified":"2026-02-20T16:02:54","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T21:02:54","slug":"abysmal-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/08\/abysmal-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Abysmal Services"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.coryd.dev\/posts\/2025\/all-of-apples-services-are-abysmal\/\">Cory Dransfeldt<\/a> (via <a href=\"https:\/\/mastodon.social\/@pawelgrzybek\/114301131452331593\">Pawe&#x142; Grzybek<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=43605020\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.coryd.dev\/posts\/2025\/all-of-apples-services-are-abysmal\/\"><p>They range from mediocre to outright unusable and <em>none of them are reliable<\/em>. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.coryd.dev\/posts\/2022\/apple-music-a-tale-of-woe\/\">I&rsquo;ve written about Apple Music.<\/a> That one launched and cost me a phone battery. Duplicate tracks, halting playback and heat.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>I used iCloud Mail for a bit, configured rules, deleted the rules and &mdash; well &mdash; the rules kept on executing. Nothing in the UI, no user control and filter filter filter. I contacted support and they asked me to restart macOS&rsquo; Mail.app before asking me for a screenshot of the phantom rule firing.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>Can&rsquo;t sync bookmarks, can sync passwords. The last time I tried this and changed an email address on an entry, I got an extra entry with the new email.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>[iCloud Drive] works until it doesn&rsquo;t and when it doesn&rsquo;t it locks your entire machine up. Slowly. How do you write the file system, the file system browser and the sync service and have the sync service freeze the whole damn thing? Not slow down, make it completely unusable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>He&rsquo;s had a good experience with iMessage. I still find that it sometimes doesn&rsquo;t deliver messages. Syncing and search mostly don&rsquo;t work.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/28\/apple-needs-a-snow-sequoia\/\">Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/13\/rotten\/\">Rotten<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/12\/apple-delays-more-personalized-siri-apple-intelligence-features\/\">Apple Delays &ldquo;More Personalized Siri&rdquo; Apple Intelligence Features<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/03\/2024-six-colors-apple-report-card\/\">2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/22\/taboola-apple-news\/\">Taboola + Apple News<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/15\/apple-news-you-cant-use\/\">Apple News You Can&rsquo;t Use<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/07\/tv-app-in-tvos-17-2\/\">TV.app in tvOS 17.2<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/26\/apple-services-price-hikes\/\">Apple Services Price Hikes<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/25\/ads-in-the-windows-11-start-menu-and-in-ios\/\">Ads in the Windows 11 Start Menu and in iOS<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/10\/music-to-no-ones-ears\/\">Music to No One&rsquo;s Ears<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/06\/ios-announcements-and-offers\/\">iOS Announcements and Offers<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/14\/gass-on-apple-services\/\">Gass&eacute;e on Apple Services<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/12\/the-apple-services-experience-is-not-good-enough\/\">The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/23\/trusting-icloud-drive\/\">Trusting iCloud Drive<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"abysmal-services-update-2026-02-20\">Update (<a href=\"#abysmal-services-update-2026-02-20\">2026-02-20<\/a>): <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/jdalrymple\/status\/2023496610341417343\">Jim Dalrymple<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/x.com\/jdalrymple\/status\/2023496610341417343\">\n<p>I basically stopped using Apple Music last year because it just sucks compared to others and it insists I love Taylor swift. Only 30 songs played in 2026, not one is Taylor but Apple says she is my second most played artists.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/AppleMusic\/comments\/1r9lf33\/comment\/o6dp2nn\/\">Dave B<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/AppleMusic\/comments\/1r9lf33\/comment\/o6dp2nn\/\">\n<p>We&rsquo;re nearly 11 years into the service and it is still <a rpl=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/AppleMusic\/s\/l6VdNHs9nA\">broken<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Apple has spent the past decade adding little features and conveniences, and Alan Dye&rsquo;s team spent a decade trying to make the UI look pretty, but underneath the feature set and the aesthetics, the app is still fundamentally broken, with a terrible junk-drawer style navigation, poor information hierarchy, and a back end that is an utter mess in terms of artist and discography organization.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>In my opinion, Apple Music is the second most broken product Apple makes, only behind Siri. Despite its rough start, even Apple Maps is far more impressive today than Apple Music is. Apple Music has a lot of great aspects to it (sound quality, music selection, aesthetics, some nifty features etc&#8230;) but all of that is hampered by the broken underlying design and organization of the service.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/17\/apple-music-feedback-made-it-to-cook\/\">Apple Music Feedback Made It to Cook<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cory Dransfeldt (via Pawe&#x142; Grzybek, Hacker News): They range from mediocre to outright unusable and none of them are reliable. I&rsquo;ve written about Apple Music. That one launched and cost me a phone battery. Duplicate tracks, halting playback and heat.[&#8230;]I used iCloud Mail for a bit, configured rules, deleted the rules and &mdash; well &mdash; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-04-08T18:26:24Z","apple_news_api_id":"5e5938d1-d31e-4b42-acc4-7b317299ad03","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2026-02-20T21:02:58Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AXlk40dMeS0KsxHsxcpmtAw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[91,1230,2250,150,16,913,1417,31,2586,30,2598,690,103,247,269],"class_list":["post-47348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-appstore","tag-apple-music","tag-apple-services","tag-email","tag-icloud","tag-icloud-drive","tag-icloud-keychain","tag-ios","tag-ios-18","tag-mac","tag-macos-15-sequoia","tag-reminders","tag-safari","tag-siri","tag-syncing"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47348"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51060,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47348\/revisions\/51060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}