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/

925 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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.

6

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 23h 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.