I Hate iCloud For Windows

🔗 | by Chris McLeod

Hate is maybe too strong a word, but I can’t think of a better one in the moment. I like to think it’s not often I’ll piss-and-moan about a bit of software (these days), but the iCloud app for Windows is just so, so, so bad I’ve finally lost my patience with it. All I wanted it to do was sync my photos to my laptop, and occasionally let me grab a file from iCloud Drive. But for something that should be so simple, it’s caused nothing but trouble.

Every few weeks it would require logging into the app again with the full 2FA flow. Not in itself too bad, but at one point last year it decided it was going to get in an endless login loop despite nothing changing with my Apple account. This resulted in Apple’s systems locking me out (across all Apple devices) and forced me to reset the password through the web portal - so I then had to go login to every device again.

Syncing photos was hit-or-miss. Sometimes it would take days for a photo to show up on my laptop. The recently improved integration with the Photos app on Windows 11 didn’t work for weeks after I installed all the relevant updates and toggled the settings. Instead of the integrated view I just had an extra folder view - something I could have setup before the update 😅 It eventually started working.

And for today’s grumble? I updated my Apple account email address several weeks ago; iCloud for Windows finally caught up to the fact and asked me to login again[1]. Only, it won’t let me edit the email address in the login prompt. Which means every login attempt fails. I’d have signed out and back in again, but the rest of the UI - including the sign out button - is locked behind the login prompt, leaving me stuck. With the memories of last year’s tomfoolery still fresh enough in my mind, I don’t want to risk getting locked out again, so just… gave up and uninstalled the application.

For photo sync I’ve discovered I can achieve much the same result using the OneDrive app on my iPhone, and I can also use OneDrive to get files to my laptop. It all requires some extra hops, but at least it seems to work reliably.

  1. probably because I just had to reboot for a system update. ↩︎