I'd be interested to hear what issues you have with Apple's cloud services. I, personally, have had no problems, but am definitely curious.

One issue is how they nickel and dime you for storage space. I think you only get 5GB free and then have to "upgrade your icloud plan" even after dropping $800+ on a new phone, which you might want to back up.

Ah. I thought terrible meant "issues using the service." I do have some annoyances with how I'm charged for things, but I don't mind paying for services ($2/month for 200GB) that give me things without resorting to selling my browsing habits to the highest bidder.

5GB is actually enough for most people backing up their phones. The OS, Apps, Music, Books etc don't count towards that 5GB number.

The issue is if you take a lot of photos that you will want to upgrade. But it is a small amount.

Photo sharing doesn't seem to count towards your storage limits either...

It's not free. You must own an iDevice or a Mac to use iCloud and worse if you pay for one device you get 5gig. If you pay for 2 you don't get another 5gig

Importing thousands of pictures from my honeymoon lead to tons of duplicates. I tried to consolidate the library and a bunch got deleted. Luckly I backed up everything but I know not to fully trust apple.

The state of the phone is not synced in iCloud, its backed up into iCloud, which is not the same thing. That means if you have multiple phones, once you install a phone from another's phone backup you will have two diverging states.

Various features like "auto install apps I installed on other devices" want to hide this away, but they fail. For example, they will install apps I installed on another device, but they won't install them in the same position on the screen (something very important for me), and they won't delete it.

Also many apps, including apps made by Apple, do not use iCloud to store their settings and data, or use it inconsistently (e.g. only for data, but not for settings). One spectacular example is the messaging app, which doesn't show SMSs received on all devices (although it shows SMSs received on other devices before I made the backup, making it even more confusing). Of course, the messaging app shows iMessages. So some messages work, but others don't.

i would not trust any apple service to host/preserve my images. just have had way too many instances where images just disappear. and afaik they still haven't really explained the connection between all the celebrity phones being hacked when they were all using icloud (if someone has a link that'd be nice)

Yes Apple did explain what happened.

http://www.apple.com/pt/pr/library/2014/09/02Apple-Media-Adv...

Whilst there was a security issue in iCloud it wasn't the root cause behind the "fappening" scandal. It was purely social engineering.

To add to this, Apple also doesn't bother to make it clear to users that there are limitations to backing up their photos using iCloud. You can get pictures out of Photo Stream whenever but that's only the last 1000 photos or 30 days. For Camera roll that actually stores the backup of all of your photos, you can only access your backup if you restore it to a new or reset device. If you get a new iPhone and don't immediately restore from iCloud then too bad, you either have to wipe your new iDevice or buy a new one in order to get to your backup.