Toby Curl

I have just finally got to watching John Gruber's talk from Çingleton 2011. It's a great talk, worth watching. The talk wasn't about iCloud but one of his answers to a question at the end (around 46 minutes) he talked about not being able to use iCloud unless your app was in the App Store. This has been recently brought up with regards to the new Gatekeeper funcitonality Mountatin Lion and so reminded me of a point I haven't seen¹: the cost of iCloud to Apple.

A lot of the arguments about Apple keeping iCloud App Store only seem to focus on security, keeping developers from storing massive amounts of arbitrary data in iCloud and other such things. These are all very valid reasons and on their own good enough reasons for Apple to do this. However what about the cost of running iCloud, because it must cost Apple something. Some of the cost is likely factored into the initial purchase of the devices and Apple must take some of the money from their 30% of app sales to fund iCloud. If Apple allowed any developers to use iCloud then those not in the App Store would be costing them money.

However it is also likely that the cost of iCloud is negligible compared to other things and that all of Apples vast profits easily cover all running costs of the service.

There must be a cost somewhere.