Why is iCloud Contact Sync such a terrible mess?

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Level 1

5 points

Why is iCloud Contact Sync such a terrible mess?

I have 3 Apple Laptops, an iPhone and an iPad.

iCloud contact syncing works with 1 Laptop (MBP 2009) and all iOS devices.

Two Laptops (Retina MBP 2013, MacBook 2015 12-inch) cannot sync contacts (rest of iCloud syncs well). I have deactivated/reactivated syncing many times, logged-out/in many times, implemented related Apple support docs and even re-installed OS X on my MBP 2013 - without success.

Sometimes, contacts changed or added via iCloud Web do sync. When I add groups, they are not synced. Suddenly, contacts are duplicated - once I even got 25 instances of a single contact - for no apparent reason.

Eventually, I had to switch of contact syncing on those two laptops, exported all contacts from the web, imported and run contacts locally.

All Laptops run the latest OS X version.

Any help much appreciated

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Aug 4, 2015 11:36 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Stu_9

Level 1

6 points

Aug 26, 2015 5:51 AM in response to cfacc

I don't think there is an answer. I love Apple and I made a conscious effort to marry myself to the entire Apple ecosystem about a year ago. iCloud, unfortunately, has been a huge disappointment. The sync is just horrible and unreliable. I can't get documents in Pages to always sync, the Contacts are inconsistent in a variety of ways, it's sporadic between devices, etc etc etc. It's also quite frustrating that they don't have a manual sync option.

I was a heavy dropbox user, but I do a lot of document editing on my iPhone and I'm not involve with the Dropbox/Microsoft/iPhone interface. Yesterday I installed Google Drive on my Mac and I think I'm going to try the Drive/Docs/iPhone approach. I'm not thrilled with that, but I think I'm giving up on iCloud.

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