“‘It just works,’ the Apple marketing slogan goes. But for the syncing features in iCloud, that promise has proven too good to be true,” Jon Mitchell writes for ReadWriteWeb. “On Thursday, the first iOS app launched that eschews iCloud in favor of a new third-party service called Simperium. If you use an iPhone or iPad, you’ll want to know why.”

“iCloud is not a discrete thing. It’s actually an ad hoc bundle of different syncing technologies, and they’re just buggy enough to be unsettling to users,” Mitchell writes. “We take Apple at its word that ‘it just works,’ but every so often, an app that syncs with iCloud takes five or ten painful seconds to open. This only has to happen once in a hundred times to shake our faith in the system.”

Mitchell writes, “Our instinct is to blame the app when it’s actually iCloud’s fault. Greg Pierce, the developer at Agile Tortoise released Drafts 2.0 and Drafts for iPad Thursday, and he decided to avoid this problem. Drafts (which I love) is the quickest way to jot anything down on the iPhone, and now it syncs to the iPad version. But rather than take the heat for iCloud’s problems, Pierce decided to make Drafts the first app to sync via third-party provider Simperium.”

Much more in the full article here.