Idée Fixins

I use at least 7 different syncing services every day to keep everything current between my laptop and my iPhone:

• Gmail, over IMAP, for email;
• MobileMe, for contact and calendar info;
• BusySync, to sync my iCal with Krista’s iCal via sharing with our two Google Calendar accounts;
• iTunes, via USB cable, for my music, podcasts, videos, photos, apps, books, PDFs, and other random files; 
• Simplenote and Notational Velocity, via Simplenote’s own homegrown web service, for notes of all kinds;
• SimpleText.ws, another homemade small-developer sync service, for my to-dos in Taskpaper;
• Dropbox, for backing up my most important writing and recent work files, and for maintaining a good “To Read” folder for PDFs that can’t be fed into Instapaper but that I might theoretically want to read while on the go (though this has never happened);
• Time Capsule wifi network, at home, for backing up our computers wirelessly every hour (not exactly syncing but not exactly not).

And that’s not to mention all the other apps that are less crucial to my life that also sync using their own self-written code.

Not only is it a hassle to set up and maintain all of these various non-integrated systems, it’s expensive: while most are free, MobileMe is a notorious ripoff at $99 a year and BusySync is just under $40. 

And it’s not like they’re all great. I ran into serious problems with BusySync and the MobileMe Calendar beta, which took me a whole afternoon to debug. iTunes and MobileMe stopped working after I upgraded to an iPhone 4. Taskpaper’s syncing often overwrites, garbles, and loses data, but that developer is in the process of rewriting the program on top of Dropbox’s new API, so it should soon be as seamless as the best of them.

Seamless, invisible, 100% reliable, cross-platform, over-the-air syncing should be built into the iPhone for free, and the SDK as well. Users shouldn’t have to be half-geeks like me to set it all up and maintain it. Developers shouldn’t have to figure out their own solution instead of focusing on their own core features. And none of it should require a wired iTunes connection (except for media syncing).

This is one of the areas where Android is way out in front, and while it’s not nearly enough to get me to switch, it is nice to see another company demonstrate that it can be done, and done very well.

One good solution would be to make MobileMe free, as many others have suggested, and offer an API to use its cloud-syncing tech. Do you think Apple hasn’t done that because a) they never do anything for free; b) they don’t think MobileMe could stand up to the strain of lots of people actually using it; or c) they know MobileMe is not very good and they’re waiting until it’s better to roll it out widely?