I'm going through apps on my phone and can hardly think what any of them would use Unicode filenames for. Say, a messenger might use user's nickname to name a history file — that would cause one-time loss of history, but not break the app. What else?

Something tells me practically no apps will be seriously affected.

Any app that stores files in iCloud Drive has a fully user-accessible chunk of filesystem; it has to give the files meaningful names and properly handle files being renamed, added, etc. from the iCloud Drive app or file picker.

So they have to deal with arbitrary filenames; on the other hand, for the same reason, they can't maintain a master list of files somewhere which would break, but have to check the actual directory contents instead. Still, things like history or links between files might be broken.

That is, unless NSFileCoordination APIs act differently wrt normalization; iCloud clients have to use those rather than accessing the filesystem directly.

> they can't maintain a master list of files somewhere which would break, but have to check the actual directory contents instead.

They should be doing that anyway. Anything else is just begging to get out of sync at some point.

You should not be using anything other than UUIDs or integers for file names. Maintain your own mapping in a database or file.

Using a network value or a value returned by an API is just asking for trouble.

If a user names a file that will be hidden behind a URL the same advice applies. If not then the user can use any sequence of bytes they want and you shouldn't care.

It's poor UI to not name a file on the user's own machine, if they'll ever have to look at it. I'm counting things like web browser caches in this because OmniDiskSweeper/etc users will be seeing the large files you put in there.

Most importantly, APFS is first being rolled out to iOS where this isn't as much of a problem because the user never really sees the filesystem anyway.

It doesn't matter much on iOS, where users rarely if at all have to access the filesystem directly. It is very rare that the same files would be accessed and modified by more than a single application anyway.

Assuming your application is the only app that will ever interact with a file is only correct in very specific circumstances. This is terrible advice in the general case.

Except filesystem experts like Dropbox, developers probably shouldn't be letting users name their files.

I'm not sure I understand. How can an app NOT allow me to name my files - unless you're talking about some iOS-like "hide the filesystem" silo.