A Code Newbie’s Impressions of iCloud Core Data vs ?? + CloudKit

I’m building an app right now where sync would be really helpful. The data in the app is very private and important. I’ve been looking into solutions for the last couple days.

Because of the fear of Parse-repeats, the obvious solutions are the Apple-sanctioned ones: iCloud Core Data and CloudKit. iCloud Core Data is the older of the pair, but based on my experience as of user with apps using this solution, I already have a poor impression of the stack. Take Realmac’s Ember for example. iCloud sync was such a disaster that it really tainted the reputation of the app. When they switched to a Dropbox solution, all of the problems went away.

Due to the amount of abstractions in iCloud Core Data, there is no transparency in terms of hunting down bugs. On the flip side, Core Data, I’ve been working through Ray Wenderlich’s Core Data By Tutorials, and Core Data as local storage seems really convenient.

Most of the big developers have moved to CloudKit as of late. It’s a newer solution that is closure to Azure. Tinkering with it a bit, it feels more like dealing with the web services at my past job. CloudKit only deals with data transfer and does not handle local storage, so the local database needs to be dealt with separately.

At this point, I’m going to keep both possibilities open, but I’m feeling most at ease using CloudKit with some sort of local database solution.