Theoretically they offer quite a few; in practice, I think nowhere or almost nowhere I've ever worked has gone for those options (except my own self-published games), instead preferring a custom solution that can be shared with web and android.

iCloud is the backend for basically any settings/file sync for normal apps.

Because the consumer market is way less demanding than businesses. Hence why B2B and B2C are categorized separately

No website uses Apple

A sync issue in drive would barely be noticed.

Apple market share is about 30%

Half the world? Not even remotely close. Not for MacBooks or iPhones or anything else. They're a niche player.

It’s a bit hidden, for example if Apple Music isn’t working it will act as if my device is having an issue with the app playing; it doesn’t look like its a service problem because it hangs and freezes the UI for play- and pretty often I will force my mail to refresh and it will say the imap server is unreachable.

Regardless, these kinds of things tend to be somewhat regional. I’m based in Sweden.

They're in double-digit numbers for complaints. Must be a new record :)

depends on where in the world you live.

If you live in a region where they operate their own data centers, you will be running on Apple data centers. If not, you're running on a mix of Google Cloud and AWS (IIRC). They used to use Azure as well, but I think that's no longer the case.

In any case, your data is encrypted (by Apple) before being uploaded to Google or AWS, and only Apple has that key. Whatever E2EE encryption you use will be applied on top of that.

1. About 25% of their service revenue is from charging commissions in app store and other 25% of the revenue is Google paying them for search default. Other services include things like insurance (applecare) That's not exactly same type services that most of the people would be thinking about.

2. A lot of their services have less criticality (and it's not a ding at them - it's often very explicit design choice).

3. App store having hiccups or iCloud backups being delayed it's not something that will usually gather enough attention of media.

Good point! I might not have noticed.

If this is mandatory, then it's not really your device.

If they were text messages, it's absurd that text messages are often routed through two servers even!

> Aren't all text messages routed through a server?

For SMS, no not a central server for all carriers. When SMS service originally launched it wasn’t even cross-carrier.

MMS acts like a mailserver at each carrier, sends a push notification and your device has like a day to download full message.

For RCS it’s supposed to be federated but carriers gave up and it’s now centralized through Google Jibe.

I don’t think it’s any more decentralized than Apple if you are talking about MMS (instead of SMS). Your carrier still provides the MMS servers.