TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Brent Simmons on why you shouldn’t use iCloud, even if it worked without issue:

Here’s the thing: half the mobile revolution is about designing and building apps for smartphones and tablets.

The other half is about writing the web services that power those apps.

How comfortable are you with outsourcing half your app to another company? The answer should be: not at all comfortable.

That’s right, and his other arguments (which are similar to the ones I made last year) are convincing, too.

iCloud is limiting, and building your own service allows you to provide more services. All true, but sometimes, all we want is for our data to follow us around to each device we use. With Quotebook, for example, I don’t really want unique social features that they could only build with a custom sync service—I just want all of my quotes on my iPhone and iPad, and I want to be able to add them from any of my devices.

In cases like Quotebook, it’s still possible that iCloud isn’t the right answer, because there’s no way for them to build a web application on top of iCloud. But that doesn’t mean they should have to write their own sync service. We should, ideally, be able to build on top of existing sync solutions, and write our own only if it’s truly necessary. I don’t think it’s good for the future of mobile computing if everyone is effectively required to write their own sync service. The number of devices people use is getting larger, but syncing data across them is still a difficult task. The goal should be to solve much of it for people.