Responding back to sync on my review

[Kip Vaughan]

Hi, I wanted to get back the developers reply of the different ways to sync. It’s been a while since I have tried them so I don’t know if anything has changed.

“IBM Still has a free 1 GB tier that you can use. Plus you can setup your own sync server with Apache CouchDB, or just sync your devices directly using Nearby Sync. iCloud sync is also an option, but it not native like the other 3 sync services.”

It seemed like there was something that wasn’t working with iCloud. Does this work now? Nearby sync worked good as a temporary solution so that my phone and computer are no longer way out of sync. I use more then 1gb as most people probably do so that makes the IBM solution hard. Doesn’t seem like I should need to pay a big monthly fee just to sync one app. That is what I meant by it would be good to figure out some solution to this if possible.

[Daniel Leu]

I’m running CouchDB on my NAS (QNAP) and I’m very happy how it works.

[Brendan]

Hi Kip,

Thanks for coming here to respond to my review response. I really appreciate that.

iCloud sync I find is slow. So if your document is more than 1 GB, then as Daniel suggested, Apache CouchDB is a great solution and is completely free. It’s just a bit more complicated to setup than the other sync services. But it’s fast and free and works well.

I didn’t want to setup my own sync service that customers would subscribe to because I would then be responsible for the security and liability of everyone’s data and that’s just not something I’m prepared to take on. Especially being a one-person company.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Sam Moffatt]

I use CouchDB on an iMac and a Linux box I have which works great for me. I don’t have these exposed to the internet but run them locally on my network. When I’m away, any changes I make get sync’d once I get home. Generally I try to make sure a device is fully up to date with changes when I leave to make sure it has all of the latest changes if I want to review something on the fly. There is obviously an extra overhead there and lack of convenience for sure.

I have a now 20GB in size document that is sync’d via CouchDB that seems to be working ok and I have another 7GB I sync via CouchDB as well. I think CouchDB is a strong solution though it is bring your own unless you want to pay for something like Cloudant.

That said, 1GB is a reasonable chunk of data. Apple only give you 5GB for free, how much are you looking to store?

[Kip Vaughan]

Sam, it looks like my database file is only 54mb but for some reason I was getting an error with Cloudant when I was using it. They changed it to a very low limit whatever it was. Probably to make sure everyone was paying to use their service. I have the maximum iCloud storage setting which is mostly empty so it seems like it would make the most sense to use that. I don’t know how much slower iCloud is, I guess syncing doesn’t have to be super fast but if I use the service to shooting medium sized 4K videos it seems like it would handle database files that are primarily made up of text files and a small image easily.

Daniel, it’s good to know your service works well. I will keep that in mind if iCloud doesn’t work. I might go with iCloud first since I already use the 2TB option that offers me plenty of space.

Bredan, I guess I am wondering if it should be a one person company if one of the product’s main features isn’t what I feel is as clear to use as it should be. For an example Omnigroup has a whole suite based around one cloud service. So you don’t really have to think about how do you sync stuff. I think I signed into the service five years ago and haven’t need to think about it since. At one point I think you were saying a service like that wouldn’t work but it just seems like other programs have found ways to simplify things a lot.

[Brendan]

@Kip, well if I could add additional developers and support staff to Tap Zapp Software Inc, then I would. But I earn enough from new customers to keep Tap Forms in constant development, but just enough to support me and my family.

Tap Forms uses Apple’s CloudKit service for syncing. Every change made to a record, field, form, layout, photo, attachment, etc. is packaged into a binary blob and then fed to CloudKit. There’s a lot of error handling in there that retries when things go wrong, such as when Apple throttles the communication to prevent apps from bombarding their servers. When Tap Forms syncs, it can be sending and receiving tens of thousands of requests in a short period of time. So it’s more than just a few text files and images stored there. CloudKit is a very complex beast.

Also, I never said that a service like Omni’ sync service wouldn’t work. It just wouldn’t work for my business. And what I mean by that is since I’m only a one-person company, I don’t have the resources to build the back-end web software to be able to support a unique syncing service specially designed for Tap Forms. Omni Group I’m sure has multiple developers working on the problem. Plus they would have admin support staff to manage the servers or web service (like AWS) that they subscribe to.

I had also said that I didn’t want to be responsible for the storage of customer data on a server that I had admin access to. So that’s another reason why I don’t have my own sync service. I did actually look into it once. I asked Cloudant what it would cost to have my own sync service that I would use for my customers. I think it was a starting price of around $5000 USD per month for a measly 250 GB of disk space. That’s not something I could afford to offer I’m afraid. But that would have only been the beginning. As the number of customers increased, I would have had to either start charging for the sync service or paid more and more for larger and larger amounts of space and transaction limits.

Sync is hard. It’s really hard. And Apple does a lot of throttling of requests and their API is exceptionally complicated.

[Sam Moffatt]

You got me curious, Omni Group has 41 people! Their software is also just as expensive as I remember it too. $5k/month for 250GB seems like a rip off though :| A while back I was looking at the feasibility of doing a $1/GB server with a minimum monthly payment of $5 to get past transaction fees. Maybe I should get back to that.

Apparently it took five or six folks to do their sync server implementation on top of however long it took them to build the original sync implementation to begin with. That article points out MobileMe, iCloud’s predecessor, having sync conflicts as problematic as well. Yikes!

[Kip Vaughan]

That doesn’t surprise me given they have about five apps and many of those apps having lots of features and have undergone total re-writes in the case of Omnifocus. While the products cost more then the competitors they also give out a ton of updates without charging. Before doing that they sometimes did very extensive beta testing. If i remember right Omnifocus 2 was in beta for about a year. But maybe none of this matters since perhaps iCloud can do a good enough job. I suppose it can’t hurt to try it for a while since I can always change it back to something else.

[Sam Moffatt]

I think Tap Forms has been generous with it’s updates as well, Tap Forms 5 came out in 2016 so that is a good three coming on four years since the last paid upgrade. It’s hard when you incrementally add features, at what point do you make the cut? What is significant enough to merit a paid upgrade?

To be honest the scripting upgrade for what power it grants should have likely been a paid upgrade. Then charts were added which is a great addition to the desktop version that helped me personally identify a bunch of dodgy records and clean them up. There is another scripting upgrade coming that whilst it’ll look small from the outside, I know was a lot of work to get right.

For me the amazing thing of being on the Tap Forms journey since TF3 is seeing how far it’s come. I was a Bento refugee to TF3 and there are still a bunch of features I miss from Bento (layouts on iPad) but with TF5 it’s managed to surpass Bento and in my mind is starting to catch up to File Maker, a product that is an order of magnitude more expensive. A richer report generation interface I feel could probably cause it to close most of that gap (and should be a paid upgrade).

[Kip Vaughan]

I tried to sync with iCloud but it took longer then a full day to sync a small file. Does it eventually complete? Nearby synced everything in a few minutes.

[Sam Moffatt]

I think it’s a function of how many records you have more so than the size. What I understand of the internals is that each record is a document, each form is a document, each link is a document, each attachment is a blob, etc. If there is rate limiting in iCloud (which I’d fully expect in any cloud environment), then you’re going to be slowed down and it’ll be a function of how many records you have.

[Author]

Posts