What is the purpose of iCloud on iPhone?

DeDeOlinde2024 wrote:

What does iCloud do for iPhone?

iCloud is used for two very important things: backing up your iPhone and syncing all of your data. Regardless of how many other Apple devices you have, you should be backing up your iPhone to iCloud, preferably daily.

How to back up your iPhone or iPad with iCloud - Apple Support

Back up your phone. Do it now. If you wait until something goes wrong, it's too late.

Whether or not you use iCloud for syncing data depends on what other devices you have. For example, I have an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac. iCloud syncing means that I have the same files, messages, passwords, photos, notes, and reminders (and probably a few other things I'm not thinking of) available on all of my devices. If I create a reminder in the Reminders app on my Mac, it will be there on my iPhone. If you have no other Apple devices, this might not be of any interest to you.

The other thing I use iCloud for that isn't strictly an iPhone thing is to access my information from other computers. At work, we use Windows computers. But, I can log into iCloud.com and access a lot (not all) of my information. It comes in very handy.

IdrisSeabright is right on. Obviously we've all had to think about this. But there are three uses for iCloud on an iPhone.

#1 Backup at Settings>[name]>iCloud>iCloud Backup

#2 Synchronizing devices so, for instance, your iPhone, iPad, and Mac all have exactly the same pictures on them.

#3 But there is a third reason: Optimizing storage. By optimizing iCloud Photos, for instance, you can have as many as 10 times as many pictures on the phone as without iCloud.

But, on the other hand, you could Backup to a computer, if you always remember to. And you may not need Synchronizing if you don't have other Apple devices. And you may not need to Optimize storage space for your stuff.

So you may not need iCloud at all. Or you may be able to get by with only the backup option, so you don't need so much iCloud storage.

See Introduction to iCloud - Apple Support.