Wow, that's straight up espionage. I bet they don't even delete the files, but just hide them from you.

I don't really assume malicious intent here - this is presumably "caching" the current unsaved changes on the cloud in case your application crashes or something. But the fact that it's not obvious at all is a major problem. There's also no way to selectively disable this behavior - if you want to use iCloud Drive for some documents you need to put up with this.

> I don't really assume malicious intent here - this is presumably "caching"

This doesn't seem like thinking critically. Do you not imagine that Apple, the size they are, with all their lawyers take a decision like this seriously? It's not like a developer unilaterally decided that they were going to make this as a feature without levels of management and execs deciding that this was okay.

Assuming incompetence rather than malice only applies when there's no previous behaviour suggesting the contrary. The only explanation I can think of for this attitude, is that if we like using Apple products, we somehow have to 'make it ok' to ourselves. I'm at least able to separate the experience with using a product with the aspect of how that product is used by its manufacturer.

Do you really imagine that there is any kind of oversight on development like this? Levels of management getting involved in some random feature? Very unrealistic.

The requirement said to not lose the customers work. Everything else was on the development team most likely.

There are narrow areas where incompetence could explain Apple's failures. There are others that I don't buy, after the incident where non-Apple branded devices were intentionally made to work degraded in a plausibly innocent way by memo decree. With privacy being such a high differentiator, allowing iCloud to be used arbitrarily for any feature without oversight assumes gross incompetence at all levels.

You can just cache activity to a local duplicate file. It's not a new idea. There's no reason to do it on the cloud.

In fact, doing it on the cloud for a local file is a really bad idea. Some of us use our phones in areas with poor connectivity.