iCloud Drive on iPhone iOS 8

You can only "see" iCloud Drive ffrom within an app that supports it by going to the "sharing" icon where it will be offered as an option. In Keynote, Pages etc. Thisappears as "move to".

THere is no app that accesses iCloud Drive (like Dropbox) presumably because of Apple's philosophical prejudice against simple file/folder management.

Me too! I was trying to find a way of usin iCloud Drive to save space on my devices by deleting on device and keeping it in iCloud Drive . But there is no elegant way to do this! Apple pride themselves on good design, and yet deliver such a poor one!

Have a folder "Preview" in/on the iCloud Drive folder on my Mac.

How can I open the .pdf docs inside this folder from my iPhone in iOS8?

Tried photos, iBooks and pages on my phone but they are not there.

As far as I can see, this is not, and never will be, possible from iOS because of the way Apple insist it must work. If you create a file in, say, Keynote, when you try to save it to iCloud Drive by "move to" you can move it to the PDFs folder, but then you cant open it in any way (And the original stays in the Keynote folder) In other words, Apple insists on forcing a folder-filetype-app relationship in iCloud Drive.

If you try to share it by saving it as a PDF the only option you have is "open in" - and since there is no App for iCloud Drive for you to open in, you cannot save it to a folder called, say, PDFs. Similarly, because there is no iCloud Drive app, you cannot look at your files in a folder and then use "open in" to get the right app to open them.

From iOS you can only save a file you have created in iCloud Drive if the app "knows" about iCloud DrivE, in which case, it does so automatically.

THis his is another example of Apples poor design and treating everyone like an idiot.

Bottom line, iCloud Drive doesn't help manage files, can't act as a way of saving device storage by use of the cloud and so falls far behind almost every competing cloud storage service. And where do I read the critical comment from techno journalists??? Oops, they all seem to have missed this.

Ps - and to add insult to injury, Safari on iOS won't let you open the web interface to iCloud to let you manage what is therein that way.

I've looked into this some more.......

The only way I can find to "download" from iCloud Drive is in Keynote, Pages and Numbers. iBooks, iTunesU have no way of doing it. I assume non-Apple apps, such asAdobe Reader, will follow anon, as one hopes, will iBooks.

To "download" you touch the + top left for a new document. This gives an iCloud option which leads you to all the folders whether created automatically or created by you. Only folders containing files the app you are in can handle are "active" and respond to touch. Similarly once in a folder, only files related to the app are active, others are greyed out.

Again, this just shows iCloud Drive is not intended to be anything like real cloud storage services.

Wow... I could not agree more. I used the Yosemite Beta all summer creating files in iCloud Drive only to find out that it was a waste of time. DropBox still Rocks. I downloaded Documents, PDF Expert and Cloud Drive and all take forever to open files in iCloud Drive. I was so looking forward to eliminating DropBox and using iCloud Drive as it appeared to be an amazing product (unfortunately only using Yosemite. You would think that after the Mobile Me fiasco they would have learned. At least with MobileMe I had Folders on my iPhone that worked.

Apple, there is still time to get it right.

This ***** big time.

I was hoping to use iCloud drive and pay my money to Apple for storage. However yet again a very basic feature over looked and ignored. I guess Microsoft will get my money and i will stop using iCloud drive.

Thanks for pointing at iCloud Explorer. Tried it (and kudos to the creator for trying to fill the gap Apple have left) - it's about 60% of what Apple ought to provide "out of the box", but really nowhere near real cloud services.

The iOS app PDF Expert is about the closest app I found to navigate apple's iCloud drive. It lets you open most documents stored therein. Work with them and save them, but NOT in specific iCloud folders you created through your iMac. another problem is that you can only bring a .pdf document, let's say from an email, to the iCloud drive but have not found a way to bring it into aspecific iCloud folder from an iOS device. Not even in PDF Expert, it uses its own folder. You can move files and folders from your iMac in the iCloud folder, not much help from iPad and iPhone. All comments are right on target. Steve Jobes famous words "it just works" don't apply here. Apple lags far behind what users are looking for. I don't mind a closed environment for security reasons but this is clearly a very narrow view by Apple. I'll take my money elsewhere then. Closed my iCloud drive. A real shame. Apple could make a lot of money doing it right, and make a lot of Apple fans happy - now beginning to alienate us.

ADDENDUM TO MY PRIOR POST:

Spent more time with PDF Expert and found a way to bring files into Apple iCloud and into an iCloud folder. either from website or email click the document icon and "open in" PDF Expert. Once done, when you open the PDF E. app the document will appear there. Click on it and it will open. Then click on the "up arrow" in the top right corner and use the option "export to iCloud drive" another dialog box opens showing you the folders in iCloud drive, click on it and use command on bottom of dialog box "move to this location". A bit cumbersome but it works. However, one must be patient as the iCloud drive folder does not always open right away - too slow at times... But it will open, sometimes right away, sometimes after a few trials... Still s....ks but at least it works. Apple really needs to up their game.

I hope enough people complain. I was truly hoping that iCloud would have the same capabilities as Dropbox. I had all my files set up during the beta only to be disappointed when Yosemite went live and iOS8 was installed. I just cannot understand why Apple would enable us to create folders on a Mac and not have the option to retrieve them on you iPhone or iPad. PDF Expert and iCloud drive suck. Why be force to use a workaround? For now I'm sticking with Dropbox and the simplicity they offer.

I did go to app-store and bought pdf Expert for iPad for 9,99.

It worked pretty buggy. If I tried to open a pages document or a number doc it just froze and I had to restart the iPhone/iPad.

Not sure what is wrong, complained and got my money back.

Hopefully it will work better later and i can buy it again or MAYBE Apple will make it work without third party apps.

You need to down load Cloud Opener in the App store and then you use iBooks to open open the file. It does work but Apple are pushing iCloud and not supporting include in IOS.

Cloud Opener is better than Drop Box being able to find the required PDF easily.