iMessage will likely never be cross-platform. Apple sees the writing on the wall, only ~10% of their userbase gets the fully integrated iOS/Mac experience, and they know they can't leave the remainder out in the cold wrt accessing their own files (hence iCloud being web accesible).

Yet you won't see Airdrop, proper Time Capsule support or other core features that don't make Apple recurring revenue add support for Windows, Android or Linux. Apple has been selective about what they're willing to do on other platforms, and its whatever they think they need to do to ensure their 1 billion iOS users are somewhat happy, while not letting their Mac sales lag (by letting the moat disappear).

Yeah, this is interesting. I still think my argument about having features as a differentiator still stands - Apple would never build (and Google would never allow) Apple to have a seamless backup and restore solution like iCloud on Android. Maybe they'll build a client, but it's always going to be a second class citizen when compared to the native clients.

And yet, Apple TV and AirPlay now as native capabilities on TV sets...

iCloud has been on Windows for years and this is the same unusable, out of date app...they just listed it in the Microsoft store.

It's a brand-new version of the app that uses Microsoft's new APIs, and it probably part of a deal to get OneDrive to better use Apple's own file APIs on the Mac and iOS. Maybe the rest of it is old and sucks but the file sync parts are all new.

Some of the dialog boxes look the exact same, but the underlying storage engine is entirely rewritten with the big change being that files are now stored with the same Windows API that backs OneDrive's "Files on Demand" feature where File Explorer now shows the entire contents of iCloud whether or not it is available offline, and Windows will ask iCloud to download files if you try to use them.

How is it unusable? I set it up once and it works perfectly

iCloud for Windows has been around for years, it isn’t new.

As mentioned above, the new version has a new API and features to it.