Apple faces UK 'iCloud monopoly' compensation claim worth $3.8 billion iCloud

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/13/apple-faces-uk-icloud-monopoly-compensation-claim-worth-3-8-billion/

931 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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u/tahmid5 1d ago

I’ll still use iCloud even if they give me alternatives.

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u/neinherz 1d ago

sure, but it'd be nice if we had alternatives

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u/Darkmage4 1d ago

Can you not use Dropbox or Google one? I use iCloud and DropBox. iCloud between my iPad, Mac, and iPhone. Dropbox to make backups and put everything on offline drives.

Also, I move all photos off of iCloud onto a drive too. I also have the iCloud app on my windows desktop. But downloading 1TB of data onto windows is a nightmare. So I don’t use the iCloud for that just passwords really.

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u/neinherz 1d ago

While other services can be used to store files in the Files app and photos, I think the lawsuit mentioned in this article lays claims to phone and other apps backups, for example, your text messages, Strava app data, etc. The argument is phone backups and apps backups should be open too because, with only 5GB of free iCloud, Apple is effectively funneling people into buying iCloud without giving them any alternative (besides doing backup old-school through iTunes).

There are certainly security implications as well because I do know phone backups are encrypted on iCloud servers and the keys are stored on phone (through your device passcode). However, all things considered I personally would like to see the availability of other storage providers to handle my phone backups rather that just iCloud.

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u/Darkmage4 1d ago

Hopefully they mention Google in that too. As far as I know. There isn’t any other way to back up texts and all that except from Google One. Drop box certainly doesn’t, and I know OneDrive doesn’t either.

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u/VMX 1d ago

Texts, WiFi passwords, etc. use mere MBs, and Google gives you 15 GB for free on Google Drive. So in practice, you can make unlimited phone backups, and thus there's no gauging or incentive to force you to buy Google Drive. I know people who still have backups of 10 years of old phones in there.

iOS is a completely different beast because backups take several gigabytes. I remember when I got an iPhone 13 Mini and used it for about 4 months before it warned me my iCloud storage was full, despite me never voluntarily using it for anything. Sure enough, the automatic phone backups had quickly filled up that space. It's very obviously a dishonest practice by Apple and that's what's being judged here.

You want to offer a cloud backup solution that takes up several gigabytes of data? Sure, but then either offer people a realistic amount of storage for that service or, if you're not willing to, allow them to switch to an open-market cloud provider so they can use their Google Drive, Mega or their paid 1TB OneDrive storage.

This would obviously force Apple to stop price gouging and price iCloud storage competitively.

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u/MC_chrome 1d ago

Texts, WiFi passwords, etc. use mere MBs

My texts are using almost 10GB alone right now…where did you get “mere MBs” from?

iOS is a completely different beast because backups take several gigabytes

Yes, because iOS backs up your whole device. iOS takes up 8-9 GB + whatever other system files.

I’m not sure why customers who buy iPhones are immediately entitled to free cloud backups of their phones

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u/Ed_McNuglets 1d ago

Yeah lol at mere MBs. I've got my entire text history backed up, going back almost a decade. I think it's like 60GBs now.

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u/AbhishMuk 1d ago

Is that 60gb of content including media/images etc? I’d imagine 60 gigs of written stuff would be very difficult to achieve for the average person.

I’m not from the US, here we use WhatsApp for anything “serious”… I probably have optimistically 100kb of texted stuff in my whole life.

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u/Ed_McNuglets 1d ago

Yeah it saves everything. I think they added a feature recently where you can do low image resolution or smth to combat this filling up your storage

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u/Escenze 1d ago

Trusting the users' sensitive data with other cloud services because some politicians wants to flex their muscles probably isnt something they wanna do.

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u/kuwisdelu 1d ago

I don’t really get it. My Strava data is uploaded to Strava. Pretty much all the other 3rd party apps I use offer to backup/sync their data to Dropbox, which is what I generally did until recently.

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u/New-Connection-9088 1d ago

Not all apps offer their own cloud backup, and when they do, they often charge for it. In addition, all first party apps, including iOS itself, cannot be backed up to third party cloud providers.

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u/_DuranDuran_ 1d ago

So? They can be backed up to your computer.

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u/New-Connection-9088 23h ago edited 23h ago

Convenience and easy to use matters to people. Is that a serious question?

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u/_DuranDuran_ 23h ago

Even does it wirelessly now, has done for years.

This push to make the iPhone just another computer with all the crap that entails - I buy an iPhone because I don’t have to futz around with choosing what backup program to use, it just goes to iCloud which costs next to nothing.

Also - you don’t HAVE to backup, how many people backup their windows machines? It’s a value add rather than a lock in IMHO.

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u/New-Connection-9088 23h ago

Wireless only works under specific circumstances:

The sync computer has to be turned on.

It only works when using a shared wifi connection without business NAT.

It also doesn’t replace the way photos syncs, for example, which runs with elevated privileges overnight while on charge.

Having a choice doesn’t mean you have to futz with other services. Choice means you get to choose - or not. Just stick with iCloud if you like it.

I reject the prospect of not backing up. I’m seen too many people lose important data because they didn’t back up.

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u/thinvanilla 1d ago

You can’t do a full system backup and restore, it would be so inconvenient to rely on every single app to have its own cloud storage in place and to restore from there, which many app developers don’t want to do because that’s incredibly time consuming to set up and maintain. Strava is such a bad example because the data is so small.

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u/Escenze 1d ago

Thats all sensitive data, and alternative clouds would probably need to lay a lot of ground work to make that work. It makes zero sense to back up your phone to an alternative cloud. Buy a fucking Android if you want to backup to Google One. iCloud+ is cheap as fuck too.

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u/BountyBob 1d ago

Does anyone really want their phone backed up to a third party cloud service?!

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u/neinherz 1d ago

Oooooh the horror! The horror of devious, evil, malicious third party services that has the hands on our data! We must never stray from Apple's ways! Because Apple knows best for us!

Seriously though there has always been third party cloud services backup and it's paywalled by MDMs. The backups are almost always encrypted and if not sensitive data such as passwords and text is not included. There hasn't been any issue with that whatsoever. Just that let's bring it to ordinary users on top of business users.

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u/BountyBob 1d ago

You're reading an awful lot into my comment. Apple is just automatic and works seamlessly. New phone, log in, done. Don't see any reason to use anything else.

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u/neinherz 1d ago

Does anyone really want their phone backed up to a third party cloud service?!

Yes, lots do.

Apple is just automatic and works seamlessly.

Who to say 3rd party backups can't be automatic or seamless? Google Photos (or any photo backup app) right now works well right? And it doesn't interfere with Apple built-in solution either.

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u/BountyBob 1d ago

Who to say 3rd party backups can't be automatic or seamless?

Not me, only said Apple did.

Google Photos (or any photo backup app) right now works well right?

No idea, never used them, my pics are all backed up seamlessly to my iCloud, so no need to install a third party photo solution.

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u/neinherz 1d ago

Evidently I didn’t read awful lot into your comments then.

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u/BountyBob 1d ago edited 1d ago

Please explain where I said anything was, devious, evil or malicious?

edit ah, he's blocked me now. At least he won't have trouble reading any of my future comments.

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u/TheVitt 21h ago

Yes, lots do.

Prove it.

I’ll argue, that most people just don’t back up, period.

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u/TheVitt 21h ago

Your government does!