The Potential of MobileMe
Shawn:
In its current state as “exchange for the rest of us” MobileMe seems neither exciting nor ambitious. […] And iDisk? Well, that is also collecting dust.
It truly is one of iOS’ biggest flaws: that lack of painless syncing. Android doesn’t have this problem; I’ve plugged my phone into my computer two times, total.
While I feel that any developer making an application that uses data that could be accessed anywhere should build their own cloud service1, Android provides this to mobile developers who don’t know much about servers. You can use a BackupAgent to allow easy re-installation on a new phone, and use addPeriodicSync to sync any data the same way Calendar or Contacts syncs.
-
Which shouldn’t be too hard for most developers. You just need a database, and a simple API to send and receive the data. ↩
