I hate to have to sardonically upvote this but Apple has really been losing their way.I find both my iMac and my iPhone to be increasingly nagware-focused, especially because I have zero desire to use iCloud.
I don't need 2 different cloud storage providers, let me use the one I already have.
Android doesn't have most of these restrictions so OneDrive works more like iCloud there.
Despite that, I'm not paying an extra $10/mo on top of the $99/yr I pay for Office 365 because the limitations are artificial. I can launch OneDrive to sync photos/videos just fine, all my contacts are already in the cloud and I can make manual backups of my phone directly to my PC but frankly all the content I care about is not on the phone so I only do that before any major upgrades.
If preloading Chrome on Android is anti-competitive, the way Apple uses its market power to give preferential treatment to its own services vs spotify, onedrive, etc is definitely anticompetetive.
I tried to give OneDrive a chance but the close integration with Microsoft Office meant that I frequently could not save the documents I was working on because OneDrive didn't want to save. The nagging to install OneDrive killed it for me because it caused lost work.
Microsoft did the same with OneNote. OneNote was a great notetaking application, but Microsoft managed to put two buttons on the taskbar, three on the desktop, commandeer the Print Dialogs and use every other trick in the book to trick people into using it. Then it a fit of mindlessness they removed the ability to have a local (non-cloud) Notebook and I was gone.
I'm sure there's a perfect way to use it for all my use cases. But doing so would require I learn / study the correct OneDrive-specific settings. Which would only be useful for OneDrive.
But by far worse, the defaults on most Microsoft products don't follow first, do no harm. Consequently, unless I learn the settings and monkey with them, adopting the product will negatively impact me.
- No Windows support
- No Android support
- Synchronization is not reliable
- Very pricey, and free tier is too small
- "We're going to take all your documents hostage in our cloud, because you've got only 100GB space left" (after taking the space by APFS snapshots).
It might be fine for some casual users, but not for any device than stores anything serious.
I run my own services for email, web publishing, calendar, identity, remote storage, etc. So Icloud already would have to be better-enough than mine to make me want to change. When they do accomplish that, it is mainly by making it difficult or impossible to use mine.
I have a lot of history built up in my services that I'd have to agree to trash or somehow move. That history is important to me - I have a quarter-century of personal mail, and about 15 years of photography, as just a couple examples. Considering the average lifespan of Apple's various attempts at services over the years, this one is super easy - my "cloud" has already outlived nearly all of their offerings. Apple was hawking eWorld when I started running my mail server.
More generally, I trust myself more than I trust Apple to get this right. I understand why you trust Apple more than me, but that's an entirely different proposition. This isn't hubris, it's categorization - we operate at wildly different scales for wildly different-sized customer bases pursuing very different goals.
Finally, integration. Apple is going in the direction of integrated-everything. I'm pulling in the other direction - at this point most of my computing infra is not Apple, and I've already decided I'm not getting another Mac as my everyday laptop. I'll decide what that means about the phone next time I need to replace it, but it probably means we're headed for a divorce. Luckily, I've never put my data in a position to make that a harder choice than it should be.
So there you go.