> But the lack of a comprehensive solution for photo synchronization is telling as well.

If you turn on Google+ Instant Upload, you get very good photo synchronization support, especially for Android. Photos are synced to Google+ in the background, and since that is backed by Picasa, they automatically show up in the Galleries of any other Android device you have. I've been impressed with how quickly and easily you can browse your uploaded photos on another device.

It isn't for everyone because Google+ limits the maximum resolution of Instant Upload photos, but it is for a lot of people because they give you "unlimited storage" in exchange.

google has ceded the lead here because files suck. users don't want files or filesystems. look to how iOS works for how most users want to access their files: they open an app and the documents that are relevant to that app are available to them. whether that data is stored in a filesystem or in a database, locally or remotely is totally irrelevant. google docs works like this. picasaweb (or g+ photos now i guess) works like this. google music works like this. the very nature of dropbox is to not be the ideal solution to the problem they are solving. they're the realist's solution, google is going for the idealist's solution.

imho, google is leading the market here by not being a part of it.

> google music works like this

It's funny, I like a lot of the ways Google has abstracted away from files (e.g. Google Docs or Picasa), but Google Music drives me batty.

Even though they're wonderful about streaming and "pinning" songs offline (even over 3G), I just want to download the music and know where it is. I often use players other than Google Music, so that's part of it, but I think I also just want tighter control over music than I want over other things. I've ended up using Amazon Cloud Player instead, even though I successfully download or stream over 3G once in a blue moon (if that).

Honestly I suspect Google is trying to grow a third party ecosystem.

By that I mean they leave obvious problems half solved or unsolved so that someone else can come along and do a really good job of it.

Cyanogen, GetJar, Dropbox, Opera, alt home screens, etc. By doing a 40% job Google leaves easy victories for third parties.

I expect the 'end game' is a better OS with a healthy ecosystem and is not dependent on Google.

Remember Google got into mobile to protect their ad market. A healthy competitive OS ecosystem would do this all without massive long-term engineering effort. Why build an OS and ecosystem if all you have to build is the OS?

Google has nothing to do with this topic, but for what it is worth Android syncs all (if not almost all) Google related data from Android devices.

If you have a Picasa account Android comes with a sync adapter which seamlessly syncs photos to all your Android devices and PC's with Picasa.

What advantage does iCloud have over this for photos?

Android also syncs Google docs, browser/Chrome data, contacts, calendar... The only thing I can think of that Google doesn't sync (yet) is files.

Oh, for first-party stuff, iCloud has no advantage. It's for _third_ party stuff that it's valuable; it allows developers to sync _their_ data seamlessly between devices easily.

Yep, that is definitely leg up for iCloud I hadn't considered.

Developers can write their own sync adapters on Android, but they would need to run their own servers (or find storage) and complications start to add up from there.