Craig Hockenberry: iCloud Clusterfuck:
"Anyone who’s not a developer, and hasn’t been burned by a bad OS, does not know the kind of trouble that lies ahead. It’s irresponsible for Apple to release a public beta with known issues in iCloud. It’s doubly egregious to then promote that release with an email campaign to customers. For a company that prides itself in presenting a unified front, it sure looks like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing."
I've been doing this long enough to remember when the .Mac APIs were built against an SDK. I understand why Apple ties iCloud API updates to OS releases, but I really wish they wouldn't. Apple's coders are smart enough to make things backwards compatible, and being able to deploy new iCloud APIs to last year's OS release would be a nice win for everyone.
And more importantly, a separate SDK that isn't tied to this year's beta OS means less instability for developers testing the new OS update. At this point in the beta cycle, I would usually be running 10.15 full time. I've barely tested it this year, precisely because of the iCloud issues people were encountering. When a new build comes out I boot into it, test my apps, and then go back to 10.14 for work.
This isn't good for Apple, and I know I'm not the only developer taking this approach for this OS cycle.