Over the last couple of weeks I’ve looked at how iCloud and iCloud Drive work, and how they sometimes don’t work as we might expect. To round off this coverage I today consider how we got here in a brief history of Apple’s online and cloud services, and tomorrow I’ll consider where Apple sees this going.

Apple’s first concerted attempt to support online services dates back to the 1990s in what could have been a groundbreaking product, Cyberdog. One of the Big Ideas at the time was document-centred software components, implemented by Microsoft in Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), and by Apple in its rival OpenDoc. Rather than apps growing into large monolithic structures that contained repetitious code to perform common functions, OpenDoc intended to support task-specific reusable software components that could be linked together. This approach was adopted as one of the foundations of Taligent, intended to be the future operating system for the Mac as the successor to Classic Mac OS.

Cyberdog lasted little more than a year, during which it offered readers for email and news, supported web browsing and FTP for file transfer, and managed address books. Although OpenDoc and Cyberdog attracted a lot of interest from independent developers, I have always suspected that they generated hostility from larger corporations. The last release of Cyberdog shipped in Mac OS 8 in 1997, and the whole OpenDoc and Taligent projects foundered at the same time, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and NeXTSTEP became the way ahead for the Mac. The modern descendants of OpenDoc’s software components are the large API libraries provided in macOS, many of them with the suffix Kit.

Just five days into the new millennium, on 5 January 2000, Apple released Cyberdog’s successor, iTools, including the first @mac.com email service, HomePage, a web publishing service, and iDisk, Apple’s first remote file storage supporting images, movies and other documents. iDisk initially came with 50 MB of free storage for those using iTools (also free of charge), and integrated with Mac OS X as a network drive, making it the precursor of iCloud Drive.

iTools became so popular that Apple transformed it into its first subscription service as .Mac in July 2002. In addition to existing features such as iDisk, this added Backup of files from local storage to iDisk, and a free anti-virus scanner Virex, although that was discontinued in 2005. Within two months, Apple claimed that .Mac had over 100,000 subscribers; although that may seem small compared with the vast numbers now accessing the internet, at the time that represented explosive growth. Many of those subscriptions came from sales of the boxed physical product, as online purchasing was still in its infancy.

Within five years, .Mac had become increasingly popular among Mac users, and had undergone enhancement to provide 10 GB of bundled storage, largely shared between mail and iDisk with its backups, and those prepared to pay more could increase that to 30 GB. Backup had fallen from favour with the release of local backup using Time Machine in 2007, although that was primarily intended to support sales of Apple’s Time Capsule NAS systems.

Apple then decided to transition from the success of .Mac to its successor MobileMe in the summer of 2008, which turned out to be its first big mistake with its online services: the replacement had been rushed against a background of other major changes including the launch of the App Store and other advances for iPhones. MobileMe became known for its unreliability and poor synchronisation, but its replacement wasn’t announced for three years. At least it increased basic storage to 20 GB, with options to pay for more, and added more services including a proper Address Book and shared calendars in iCal.

iCloud had first been announced at the end of May 2011, and was launched that October, with all MobileMe services being discontinued at the end of June 2012. Within a week of its launch, Apple claimed that iCloud had 20 million users, although many of those would have been iPhone rather than Mac users, and most would have had free entry-level subscriptions without paying for additional storage beyond the basic 5 GB, and very few paying for the top tier of 2 TB.

Since then iCloud has provided four main types of service:

• shared databases for bundled apps like Contacts, Calendar and Notes and third-party apps;
• shared files in iCloud Drive, and inside app-specific container folders;
• iCloud mail;
• additional specialist services including Messages on iCloud, Find My, and extras bundled with iCloud+ such as Private Relay.

Estimates of the total number of iCloud users are hard to come by, but it now must be approaching one billion, the majority of whom access its services only from an Apple device. iCloud’s storage is distributed across several different cloud service providers, including Apple’s own data centres, and those of Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Tomorrow I’ll consider where Apple sees iCloud going in the future.