5 ms·

Apple forces each iOS app to have its own independent system for managing files

39 points by kaiwen1 14y ago

mitchty 14y ago
Title is just a skosh editorialized.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I disagree. The post ends with "We HATE it!", with "HATE" bolded. The title (rage included) is a pretty accurate summary of what you're going to read. Now if you're asking if this is a useful way of starting an HN discussion about whether or not iOS should change its file managment... I'd say probably not, but that's a different question from whether or not the title accurately captures what the link points to.
- damian2000 14y ago
  Conjures up a 2 year old who's been denied a piece of candy.
- benatkin 14y ago
  Someone with access to edit headlines on HN fixed it. When I first saw it, it said "hate apple for" while the actual post said "hate it". That changes the meaning of it.
jmillikin 14y ago
Android has direct filesystem access, but I can't think of the last time I ever used it. The "sharing" mechanism provides a much nicer experience than forcing the user to fumble around in a tree abstraction that hasn't changed in ~40 years. I eagerly await the day when filenames become completely opaque identifiers, never exposed in the UI. iOS's problem is that there is no standardized way for third-party apps to allow other apps access to a particular document. That's what the OP is actually asking for. Just because desktops have historically implemented this feature as an N-ary tree of (string, blob) pairs doesn't matter.
- seppo0010 14y ago
  Android's data provider interfaces are so neat on this subject. I can't believe iOS did not implement anything like it yet.
  - shawn-butler 14y ago
    If you mean ContentProvider [0] that is really only useful for highly structured data. Falls apart pretty quickly for non-relational data files and documents as well as media, or do you have some counter examples I could consider? [0]: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/ContentProvider.html http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Conte...
    - seppo0010 14y ago
      That is what I meant. Can you explain why in falls apart?
- Negitivefrags 14y ago
  There seems to be a prevailing attitude among some that the "users" don't like trees of files and we should all move to something more advanced. It has always seemed weird to me. Is something being 40 years old make it bad? Humans naturally like to put things in hierarchies. It is a very well understood concept by everyone.
  - petsos 14y ago
    > It is a very well understood concept by everyone. No it is not.
    - Negitivefrags 14y ago
      People can navigate a web page. They can find a food item in a menu or in the supermarket. There are a million examples. Hierarchical navigation is central to living in society.
vinnybhaskar 14y ago
I guess this guy does not understand what sandboxing is and the benefit it brings in terms of security. Android today has 79% of malware issues and IOS is at 0.7% — thanks to policies like sandboxing. Reference: http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/07/f-secure-android-malware-report/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/07/f-secure-android-malware-r...
- jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
  Agreed. Developers are generally intelligent people but unfortunately many users are not. Sandboxing is for those people and it does its job well. I do think however that there is a case for allowing a vendor-level sandbox so that apps made by the same vendor could share data amongst themselves. This would facilitate free-trial to paid app upgrades. In any case, give it time. Apple tends to start off with a solid base and build from there (rather than throwing everything onto the wall to see what sticks).
- anotherbadlogin 14y ago
  And I guess you do not understand that Apple could achieve the same thing with a COMMON sandbox for third-party applications. You don't have to give applications access to the entire Unix volume. Just give us a place to grant common access to non-executable files.
randall 14y ago
>> "Does anyone benefit from this?" Yes, users. Presumably, in Apple's view, the filesystem is a poor metaphor for users. Users think of their files as "in iTunes" or the like. Removing the filesystem separates concerns by requiring more strict ways of passing files around. >> "each app must copy every file it needs access to" >> "Each and every developer must reinvent the file system" These points are fair criticisms, but to claim blankly, "Apple needs to make a full U-turn on this" seems a bit much. I think there are a lot of potential fixes for this issue, and even though the author dismisses Dropbox, it seems like an obvious potential solution. There are other OS-level potentials though, like web intents, etc. The claims, however, seem like a one-sided argument which fails to understand Apple's line of reasoning whatsoever.
- anotherbadlogin 14y ago
  How on earth is Dropbox a workaround for this? You want to round-trip potentially massive files through a third-party Internet server over a cellular connection? And that's assuming you HAVE a connection. And that you're not in another country paying out the ass for data. Why the hell should we accept that rip-off without calling Apple out on it? Apple loves to live in its own world where Apple tells users how those users THINK, and where it pretends never to have heard of the valid criticisms leveled at it year after year. Nobody fears file systems. That's like saying we fear tables of contents or outlines. And hey, if you don't "get" files, then don't launch the file browser! People excusing hobbled products always pretend not to understand OPTIONS. Nobody is proposing that Apple turn the home screen into a directory tree. By crippling iOS and its SDK, Apple has squandered much of the potential of their handheld Unix computers. This guy's article identifies one of the worst offenses.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  It became such a pain in the ass for audio users that a new inter-app standard, AudioBus, was given the greenlight by Apple after accumulating signups from thousands of musicians who wanted to push audio & MIDI data between apps.
  - coldtea 14y ago
danilocampos 14y ago
> Stop it Apple! Every minute we spend dealing with this nonsense is a minute of lost productivity and a minute of aggravation. Collectively we've clocked up billions of these minutes and we hate it! You understand, Apple? We HATE it! Do you remember that Leave Britney Alone kid? Speaking as a developer, the ability to do interesting things with files has improved dramatically over the years. You can do the email attachment thing, iTunes sync, clipboard, Dropbox... In my day, we put things on S3 and passed custom links around. And we liked it! (Not really; it was terrible.) As a user, now, I call bullshit. It's occasionally weird but it's definitely not a rage-inducing condition. Besides that, Apple has found an easy-to-communicate means of enabling their users manage the limitations of their storage: Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected. Does it make for some duped data? Probably. Maybe tons for certain workflows. Doesn't matter. The hermitcally sealed environments of each app let a larger swath of their userbase manage things without outside help. Limited complexity makes it easy to understand the scope of possible problems and solutions. tl;dr: Ain't no Santa Claus and keep on crying.
- derefr 14y ago
  > Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected. To put it another way: apps need to communicate large blobs of information (i.e., documents). You'd say, from first principles, that they need a nonvolatile Inter-Process Communication mechanism. In most OSes, apps pass documents between them with the moral equivalent of "shared memory" IPC: files that both apps have read/write access to. In iOS, on the other hand, apps use the moral equivalent of message-passing-with-copy. Thus, apps get all the same benefits from this that, say, Erlang processes get from in-memory message-passing-with-copy IPC. The primary one being that when the process/app is removed from the system, all its resources can be released, without having to disentangle them from any other process/app that might be depending on them. This gives you the dual philosophies of "let it crash" and "just delete it", respectively.
arpit 14y ago
I wrote about this a while back: http://arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/28/is-the-file-system-an-outdated-concept/ http://arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/28/is-the-file-system-an... Not having a mess of folders I need to deal with is mostly a welcome change in the new devices. On iOS I never have to think about the files, but if I do uninstall an app (say if I get a better drawing app or something), all my work done in app 1 is lost. On Android thats not always the case though I do find folders of data written by apps that I have uninstalled and had no idea was still around. I think having a file system is a good thing, but it doesnt need to be very much in a user's face. A middle ground may be where a user doesn't see a file system but can get a prompt like "Get data from app..." that then negotiates with the other app to actually find the relevant directories.
azov 14y ago
It's a tradeoff. Not sharing files means that rogue/buggy apps can't mess up data from other apps, app developers can change file formats without worrying about other apps reading their files, you don't need to worry about files left over after you delete an app, etc. On the flip side, nobody except Apple can implement utilities that work with "data regardless of what kind of data it is" - things like synchronization, compression, encryption. Personally, I agree with the OP in a sense that I don't like the choice that Apple made, but I can see their logic... And given that choice, what I would really like to see is more apps using UIFileSharingEnabled key, which allows me to copy files between app sandbox and my computer via iTunes - you hear me, Dropbox?
long 14y ago
It seems like Apple is doing kind of a "pure" filesystem (i.e., no global state). If hard drives get fast enough, I can see that being what you want.
ghshephard 14y ago
I'm sure there is a use case for sharing files between applications beyond what we currently have (Photos, Contacts), but, in the 5+ years I've been using my iPhone (and it's 200+ current apps installed currently on my phone) - I've never run into it. I (personally) love the fact that everything is reasonably sealed off. In fact, the major problem I had with the iPhone was that it allowed applications to access my address book without my explicit permission (since resolved) - it wasn't sealed off enough. I'll be the first person to sign a petition requesting that Apple continue to enforce their absolute separation without really explicit guidance from me. The tradeoff (lack of flexibility versus increased security) is one that I'm very happy to make.
- dthunt 14y ago
  I ran into that on my first day, and a bunch of times since. I guess you've never been in an airport, and realized you left that audio book at home, and though to yourself "Oh, right, I'll just copy it over." Surprise, unless your scp application has a built in audio player, tough nuggets. It's infuriating when you're dealing with ebooks in other languages (particularly Japanese) as iBooks and a bunch of other apps are not very good at supporting these. With no way of sharing books between apps, you wind up needing to find a new way to smuggle your book app to app in order to find out that this one doesn't work, either. I'm sick of all the apple apologists acting like this isn't a pain point or that inability to do these things is somehow good. It's bad, it's a major pain point, and it's not about malware. It's about limiting your choices. I'm also willing to attribute the lack of app-app sharing of data to intellectual cowardice.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    I'm not an Apple apologist. They make some miserable choices, and a some of their apps are complete crap (Their podcast app should have never, ever been released.) I've never been happy with any of their cloud applications, mobile me was crud, their web photo sharing system is still next to useless, and photostream is barely useable - you'd think after a couple years they would have been able to figure out how DropBox syncs so reliably. Battery Management is horrible - I can't tell what's heating up my iPhone and sucking down my battery. Background applications STILL can't download files, even when you have 100% battery, are plugged in, and are on WiFi (Seriously - when is Apple ever going to figure that one out - When will my NYT app be able to download a newspaper, OmniFocus Sync my Tasks, Downcast download my Podcasts, etc..). I could go on and on about the things I don't like about Apple, and Apple products - but, the one thing they nailed is 100% App Separation on the iPhone. Malware is already starting to make it's way onto the iPhone, and the more they can do to lock down that platform, the happier I'll be. Does this mean that I don't have the flexibility with my Phone that I have with my Laptop? Yes. But does it mean my phone is about 10x more consistently reliable than my Laptop - Also yes. But, with all that said - could Apple come up with a mechanism to allow some kind of Inter-App sharing, wherein you could explicitly (I.E. User Initiated, not App Initiated) send data from one application to another - Almost certainly. John Siracusa has been on them to do this for at least a couple years now - and if they'd simply use one of his (very well informed) rants as their PRD, the IOS platform would certainly evolve. But I'm hoping they do it in a way (Copy / Paste?, Sharing Icon?) that guarantees the same level of separation, reliability, and simplicity that we currently enjoy. Until then - Media viewing/consumption apps like GoodReader usually offer a pretty broad variety of input options, including just reading from your Dropbox folder (among many, many choices)
pkaler 14y ago
This isn't a very well informed rant. Sandboxing exists so that malware doesn't get access to all of your files. The address book used to not be protected and look at the crapstorm that caused when Path accessed the address book without informing users. And a file tree is a poor abstraction for "mere mortals". John Siracusa has a much better discussion of why an exposed file system is a bad idea in the last episode of the Accidental Tech podcast. http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people
kalleboo 14y ago
The lack of file organization is fine for what iOS is right now. But if Apple is pushing this platform as a place to do real work, there ought to be a way to group assets by project, save/restore them as a group, etc. Maybe this could be done as tags, but I don't know if users actually prefer that to folders. For instance, on the Mac you have the "Web Receipts" folder for all your saved purchase receipts. On iOS, where would those go? The Apple solution would be a dedicated "Receipts" app, where otherwise a generic PDF viewer would do the same job. iOS is kind of the opposite of the Unix philosophy - every app has to do everything.
parasubvert 14y ago
As I replied to this developer, I think a device-level file management store and UX is very 80s. The solution to the current trade off IMO is to maintain the sandboxes, but to fix pervasive search across apps and devices - expose more data facets, make the UX ubiquitous, ensure strong default privacy controls, and oh yes, ensure the FAST=TRUE setting is enabled. That's how you outflank DropBox. I'm not sure if many here use iCloud search today (for mail), but it is abysmally slow and unreliable. This isn't just my personal pipe dream - apple really needs to fix search... but they could do it in a way that is consistent with their long term goal of eliminating the hierarchical file system for regular users, and really revolutionizing data access/sharing UX.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

39 points by kaiwen1 14y ago

mitchty 14y ago

Title is just a skosh editorialized.

fpgeek 14y ago
I disagree. The post ends with "We HATE it!", with "HATE" bolded. The title (rage included) is a pretty accurate summary of what you're going to read. Now if you're asking if this is a useful way of starting an HN discussion about whether or not iOS should change its file managment... I'd say probably not, but that's a different question from whether or not the title accurately captures what the link points to.
damian2000 14y ago
Conjures up a 2 year old who's been denied a piece of candy.
benatkin 14y ago
Someone with access to edit headlines on HN fixed it. When I first saw it, it said "hate apple for" while the actual post said "hate it". That changes the meaning of it.

jmillikin 14y ago

Android has direct filesystem access, but I can't think of the last time I ever used it. The "sharing" mechanism provides a much nicer experience than forcing the user to fumble around in a tree abstraction that hasn't changed in ~40 years. I eagerly await the day when filenames become completely opaque identifiers, never exposed in the UI. iOS's problem is that there is no standardized way for third-party apps to allow other apps access to a particular document. That's what the OP is actually asking for. Just because desktops have historically implemented this feature as an N-ary tree of (string, blob) pairs doesn't matter.

seppo0010 14y ago
Android's data provider interfaces are so neat on this subject. I can't believe iOS did not implement anything like it yet.
- shawn-butler 14y ago
  If you mean ContentProvider [0] that is really only useful for highly structured data. Falls apart pretty quickly for non-relational data files and documents as well as media, or do you have some counter examples I could consider? [0]: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/ContentProvider.html http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Conte...
  - seppo0010 14y ago
    That is what I meant. Can you explain why in falls apart?
Negitivefrags 14y ago
There seems to be a prevailing attitude among some that the "users" don't like trees of files and we should all move to something more advanced. It has always seemed weird to me. Is something being 40 years old make it bad? Humans naturally like to put things in hierarchies. It is a very well understood concept by everyone.
- petsos 14y ago
  > It is a very well understood concept by everyone. No it is not.
  - Negitivefrags 14y ago
    People can navigate a web page. They can find a food item in a menu or in the supermarket. There are a million examples. Hierarchical navigation is central to living in society.

vinnybhaskar 14y ago

I guess this guy does not understand what sandboxing is and the benefit it brings in terms of security. Android today has 79% of malware issues and IOS is at 0.7% — thanks to policies like sandboxing. Reference: http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/07/f-secure-android-malware-report/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/07/f-secure-android-malware-r...

jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
Agreed. Developers are generally intelligent people but unfortunately many users are not. Sandboxing is for those people and it does its job well. I do think however that there is a case for allowing a vendor-level sandbox so that apps made by the same vendor could share data amongst themselves. This would facilitate free-trial to paid app upgrades. In any case, give it time. Apple tends to start off with a solid base and build from there (rather than throwing everything onto the wall to see what sticks).
anotherbadlogin 14y ago
And I guess you do not understand that Apple could achieve the same thing with a COMMON sandbox for third-party applications. You don't have to give applications access to the entire Unix volume. Just give us a place to grant common access to non-executable files.

randall 14y ago

>> "Does anyone benefit from this?" Yes, users. Presumably, in Apple's view, the filesystem is a poor metaphor for users. Users think of their files as "in iTunes" or the like. Removing the filesystem separates concerns by requiring more strict ways of passing files around. >> "each app must copy every file it needs access to" >> "Each and every developer must reinvent the file system" These points are fair criticisms, but to claim blankly, "Apple needs to make a full U-turn on this" seems a bit much. I think there are a lot of potential fixes for this issue, and even though the author dismisses Dropbox, it seems like an obvious potential solution. There are other OS-level potentials though, like web intents, etc. The claims, however, seem like a one-sided argument which fails to understand Apple's line of reasoning whatsoever.

anotherbadlogin 14y ago
How on earth is Dropbox a workaround for this? You want to round-trip potentially massive files through a third-party Internet server over a cellular connection? And that's assuming you HAVE a connection. And that you're not in another country paying out the ass for data. Why the hell should we accept that rip-off without calling Apple out on it? Apple loves to live in its own world where Apple tells users how those users THINK, and where it pretends never to have heard of the valid criticisms leveled at it year after year. Nobody fears file systems. That's like saying we fear tables of contents or outlines. And hey, if you don't "get" files, then don't launch the file browser! People excusing hobbled products always pretend not to understand OPTIONS. Nobody is proposing that Apple turn the home screen into a directory tree. By crippling iOS and its SDK, Apple has squandered much of the potential of their handheld Unix computers. This guy's article identifies one of the worst offenses.
anigbrowl 14y ago
It became such a pain in the ass for audio users that a new inter-app standard, AudioBus, was given the greenlight by Apple after accumulating signups from thousands of musicians who wanted to push audio & MIDI data between apps.
- coldtea 14y ago

danilocampos 14y ago

> Stop it Apple! Every minute we spend dealing with this nonsense is a minute of lost productivity and a minute of aggravation. Collectively we've clocked up billions of these minutes and we hate it! You understand, Apple? We HATE it! Do you remember that Leave Britney Alone kid? Speaking as a developer, the ability to do interesting things with files has improved dramatically over the years. You can do the email attachment thing, iTunes sync, clipboard, Dropbox... In my day, we put things on S3 and passed custom links around. And we liked it! (Not really; it was terrible.) As a user, now, I call bullshit. It's occasionally weird but it's definitely not a rage-inducing condition. Besides that, Apple has found an easy-to-communicate means of enabling their users manage the limitations of their storage: Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected. Does it make for some duped data? Probably. Maybe tons for certain workflows. Doesn't matter. The hermitcally sealed environments of each app let a larger swath of their userbase manage things without outside help. Limited complexity makes it easy to understand the scope of possible problems and solutions. tl;dr: Ain't no Santa Claus and keep on crying.

derefr 14y ago
> Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected. To put it another way: apps need to communicate large blobs of information (i.e., documents). You'd say, from first principles, that they need a nonvolatile Inter-Process Communication mechanism. In most OSes, apps pass documents between them with the moral equivalent of "shared memory" IPC: files that both apps have read/write access to. In iOS, on the other hand, apps use the moral equivalent of message-passing-with-copy. Thus, apps get all the same benefits from this that, say, Erlang processes get from in-memory message-passing-with-copy IPC. The primary one being that when the process/app is removed from the system, all its resources can be released, without having to disentangle them from any other process/app that might be depending on them. This gives you the dual philosophies of "let it crash" and "just delete it", respectively.

arpit 14y ago

I wrote about this a while back: http://arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/28/is-the-file-system-an-outdated-concept/ http://arpitonline.com/blog/2010/03/28/is-the-file-system-an... Not having a mess of folders I need to deal with is mostly a welcome change in the new devices. On iOS I never have to think about the files, but if I do uninstall an app (say if I get a better drawing app or something), all my work done in app 1 is lost. On Android thats not always the case though I do find folders of data written by apps that I have uninstalled and had no idea was still around. I think having a file system is a good thing, but it doesnt need to be very much in a user's face. A middle ground may be where a user doesn't see a file system but can get a prompt like "Get data from app..." that then negotiates with the other app to actually find the relevant directories.

azov 14y ago

It's a tradeoff. Not sharing files means that rogue/buggy apps can't mess up data from other apps, app developers can change file formats without worrying about other apps reading their files, you don't need to worry about files left over after you delete an app, etc. On the flip side, nobody except Apple can implement utilities that work with "data regardless of what kind of data it is" - things like synchronization, compression, encryption. Personally, I agree with the OP in a sense that I don't like the choice that Apple made, but I can see their logic... And given that choice, what I would really like to see is more apps using UIFileSharingEnabled key, which allows me to copy files between app sandbox and my computer via iTunes - you hear me, Dropbox?

long 14y ago

It seems like Apple is doing kind of a "pure" filesystem (i.e., no global state). If hard drives get fast enough, I can see that being what you want.

ghshephard 14y ago

I'm sure there is a use case for sharing files between applications beyond what we currently have (Photos, Contacts), but, in the 5+ years I've been using my iPhone (and it's 200+ current apps installed currently on my phone) - I've never run into it. I (personally) love the fact that everything is reasonably sealed off. In fact, the major problem I had with the iPhone was that it allowed applications to access my address book without my explicit permission (since resolved) - it wasn't sealed off enough. I'll be the first person to sign a petition requesting that Apple continue to enforce their absolute separation without really explicit guidance from me. The tradeoff (lack of flexibility versus increased security) is one that I'm very happy to make.

dthunt 14y ago
I ran into that on my first day, and a bunch of times since. I guess you've never been in an airport, and realized you left that audio book at home, and though to yourself "Oh, right, I'll just copy it over." Surprise, unless your scp application has a built in audio player, tough nuggets. It's infuriating when you're dealing with ebooks in other languages (particularly Japanese) as iBooks and a bunch of other apps are not very good at supporting these. With no way of sharing books between apps, you wind up needing to find a new way to smuggle your book app to app in order to find out that this one doesn't work, either. I'm sick of all the apple apologists acting like this isn't a pain point or that inability to do these things is somehow good. It's bad, it's a major pain point, and it's not about malware. It's about limiting your choices. I'm also willing to attribute the lack of app-app sharing of data to intellectual cowardice.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I'm not an Apple apologist. They make some miserable choices, and a some of their apps are complete crap (Their podcast app should have never, ever been released.) I've never been happy with any of their cloud applications, mobile me was crud, their web photo sharing system is still next to useless, and photostream is barely useable - you'd think after a couple years they would have been able to figure out how DropBox syncs so reliably. Battery Management is horrible - I can't tell what's heating up my iPhone and sucking down my battery. Background applications STILL can't download files, even when you have 100% battery, are plugged in, and are on WiFi (Seriously - when is Apple ever going to figure that one out - When will my NYT app be able to download a newspaper, OmniFocus Sync my Tasks, Downcast download my Podcasts, etc..). I could go on and on about the things I don't like about Apple, and Apple products - but, the one thing they nailed is 100% App Separation on the iPhone. Malware is already starting to make it's way onto the iPhone, and the more they can do to lock down that platform, the happier I'll be. Does this mean that I don't have the flexibility with my Phone that I have with my Laptop? Yes. But does it mean my phone is about 10x more consistently reliable than my Laptop - Also yes. But, with all that said - could Apple come up with a mechanism to allow some kind of Inter-App sharing, wherein you could explicitly (I.E. User Initiated, not App Initiated) send data from one application to another - Almost certainly. John Siracusa has been on them to do this for at least a couple years now - and if they'd simply use one of his (very well informed) rants as their PRD, the IOS platform would certainly evolve. But I'm hoping they do it in a way (Copy / Paste?, Sharing Icon?) that guarantees the same level of separation, reliability, and simplicity that we currently enjoy. Until then - Media viewing/consumption apps like GoodReader usually offer a pretty broad variety of input options, including just reading from your Dropbox folder (among many, many choices)

pkaler 14y ago

This isn't a very well informed rant. Sandboxing exists so that malware doesn't get access to all of your files. The address book used to not be protected and look at the crapstorm that caused when Path accessed the address book without informing users. And a file tree is a poor abstraction for "mere mortals". John Siracusa has a much better discussion of why an exposed file system is a bad idea in the last episode of the Accidental Tech podcast. http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people

kalleboo 14y ago

The lack of file organization is fine for what iOS is right now. But if Apple is pushing this platform as a place to do real work, there ought to be a way to group assets by project, save/restore them as a group, etc. Maybe this could be done as tags, but I don't know if users actually prefer that to folders. For instance, on the Mac you have the "Web Receipts" folder for all your saved purchase receipts. On iOS, where would those go? The Apple solution would be a dedicated "Receipts" app, where otherwise a generic PDF viewer would do the same job. iOS is kind of the opposite of the Unix philosophy - every app has to do everything.

parasubvert 14y ago

As I replied to this developer, I think a device-level file management store and UX is very 80s. The solution to the current trade off IMO is to maintain the sandboxes, but to fix pervasive search across apps and devices - expose more data facets, make the UX ubiquitous, ensure strong default privacy controls, and oh yes, ensure the FAST=TRUE setting is enabled. That's how you outflank DropBox. I'm not sure if many here use iCloud search today (for mail), but it is abysmally slow and unreliable. This isn't just my personal pipe dream - apple really needs to fix search... but they could do it in a way that is consistent with their long term goal of eliminating the hierarchical file system for regular users, and really revolutionizing data access/sharing UX.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]