Why iOS 5 + Lion + iCloud = WWDC: The New iCloud Explained
June 3, 2011
Apple has already announced they will be unveiling a new cloud service called iCloud on Monday. Yet, besides the few rumors surrounding some music distribution deals, nobody really knows what iCloud really is.
Following yesterday's discovery, based on the conference schedule, we spent some time thinking about what iCloud will be, and what the banner Lion + iOS 5 + iCloud = WWDC really means. Well, we think we've figured it out. It's actually pretty obvious, here is our take:
In a nutshell, we believe Apple will be unveiling the Dropbox killer that Jon Gruber heard about back in October. That is, it's going to allow developers to move the data part of their apps to Apple's online servers.
Similar to how some Dropbox-enabled apps let you start a document on the iPad and finish it on the desktop, Apple is going to bring this to every app. Not only will this be the seamless integration we've all been waiting for, but we believe it will include features like versioning (the ability to go back to older versions of your documents, one of the new features of Mac OS X Lion), and maybe even file sharing using the AirDrop feature. This would also coincide with our belief that Apple will be bringing iOS and Mac OS X closer together. Indeed, now your Mac App Store apps and iOS apps will work together better than ever before as they'll both have access to the same data if you want them to.
Furthermore, this would also explain what Apple is reportedly doing with iTunes. Just as you'll be able to start a document in Pages for Mac and continue it in Pages for iOS, your iTunes music could potentially also be made available across platforms to your iOS iPod app.
This is not revolutionary, as Dropbox already does it, as well as many third party apps or servies. Yet, we all know that Apple wouldn't want to trust their own apps to a freemium third party service, so they had to develop their own way to implement such a great feature. With Apple's great engineering and support, this could become the standard we've really been looking forward to.
What do you think?
