All of them. Seriously. Except iMessage. Everything else? They range from mediocre to outright unusable and none of them are reliable. I've written about Apple Music. That one launched and cost me a phone battery. Duplicate tracks, halting playback and heat.
I know you're not supposed to host your own email1, but don't let Apple host it either. Or at least don't use their rules. I used iCloud Mail for a bit, configured rules, deleted the rules and — well — the rules kept on executing. Nothing in the UI, no user control and filter filter filter. I contacted support and they asked me to restart macOS' Mail.app before asking me for a screenshot of the phantom rule firing. Don't escalate it, don't grep through some logs, do take a screenshot. Mail? Tough to manage, table takes, don't trust Apple with it. Hide my email? Maybe. You did hide my rules.
Reminders? Apps for all their platforms, built into calendar, a web app without native app parity2. Don't expect them to sync consistently. Mark something done on your phone. Wait for it on your phone. Wait for it. Wait for it. Mark it done on your watch. Is it repeating? Now it's two cycles out. It just works. Poorly.
This app could be a website, but you don't care about websites or the web, because app distribution is a monopoly and that monopoly let's you extract that sweet, sweet rent. Your default browser is a laggard because it benefits your business. Developers develop in it3 so they can catch bugs in it. So many bugs. Browser choice? Only if you live in the EU because we've been legally required to provide users choices that we should provide them were we not hostile to them.
From no App Store, build web apps to no web apps, build an app (and pay us — or maybe we'll reject it, maybe we won't).
The App Store is coated in ads and promotions. Search for an app, maybe you'll find it, maybe there'll even be an ad for it above the listing for it. One app, two visuals. Sorry, that's if you can even find the app you're looking for. Search is hard. Subscriptions will stick though. They've got billing dialed.
Sign in with Apple? It's convenient and permanently tethers your login to your Apple ID.
Weather? That's Dark Sky with paint.
iCloud bookmarks? Reading list? If you've Safari for any length of time it's failed to properly sync things for you. The only reliable part of this feature set is that it will fail. Turn off syncing everywhere, restart your devices, type in a terminal command on macOS, turn everything back on. Pray. Use a different browser.4
They can sync your passwords! That'll work. Can't sync bookmarks, can sync passwords. The last time I tried this and changed an email address on an entry, I got an extra entry with the new email. Double the fun. Don't lose data do lose confidence. I've used 1Password for over a decade — it has never, never, not once lost data.
Apple News is a thing. I guess? $12.99 a month is a lot for an afterthought. Game Center? Play — uh — yeah Apple Arcade games with your friends that have an Apple device, Game Center and an Apple Arcade subscription. I don't play games, but it's a thing. It exists. Does Apple give a shit about games? Or are they hosting games from developers that have optimized their businesses to suit this model?
Apple Books works well to read ePubs. The book you're reading is at the top. After that it's about 5 rows of crap from their store. You open the app to read, but 80% of the real estate is effectively ads. Audiobooks, price drop, you read this so you'll like this, this author wrote a new book. Give us $5 once and we'll shove the rest down your throat for free, forever.5
Apple TV suffers from the same problem. Functionally it's for watching shows and movies, practically it's a vehicle for promoting Apple TV+ (and soccer — do you like soccer? WE HAVE SOCCER). Or there's a basketball game in the 4th quarter that's close. Tap to watch it — oh wait, you can't — we don't have that BUT WE DO HAVE SOCCER. It's a streaming service with a store tacked on. Kind of like Apple Music. But Apple Music supports adding your own music. It'll absolutely wreck your metadata though.
There's a Home app. For smart homes. I'm just kidding, it's for managing HomePods. It's the HomePod app. You can add other devices to it. Scan a QR code and hope for the best. Upgrade to the Matter protocol and do it all again. Use shims on Raspberry Pis to connect your other devices. Interoperability is a four letter word.
Apple Sports is a thing. There's an app for that — WE HAVE SOCCER.
Maps is nice. It took 10+ years to get there. It's usable. Maybe? I live in California so who the hell knows outside of that.
Siri can set alarms and timers. Maybe it'll pause what you're listening to, maybe it'll start it. I can't even begin to count the number of times it's played who the hell knows what out of a HomePod.
iMessage. iMessage is the exception here. It handles a staggering volume of messages and I can't recall it going down. It's free and it is one helluva moat. It's not interoperable. It never will be and Apple has actively fought any and all attempts to make it available outside of its ecosystem. RCS? Buy an iPhone. Just kidding, we'll get a half-assed implementation out the door if you force us. It works. Sometimes. Maybe on the iPhone, maybe on the Mac, probably not on the iPad. Don't ever expect it to work in multiplatform group chats.
FaceTime works ok. If you're in the Apple ecosystem. There are web links now, but you can't screen share or do anything but chat. Bare minimum. Interop is supported via web links. WEB LINKS. Funny how that works.
iCloud Drive — because Dropbox is a feature, not a platform — except where iCloud Drive is completely and utterly fucking unusable. Hell, this was a fun one. It works until it doesn't and when it doesn't it locks your entire machine up. Slowly. How do you write the file system, the file system browser and the sync service and have the sync service freeze the whole damn thing? Not slow down, make it completely unusable. Quit Finder if you can, fight to restart the machine and then make it to your iCloud preferences to turn it off, only to have the fucking switch stick. Every single setting stuck. Call support, go through 4 reps, uninstall your VPN, uninstall nextDNS. SIGN OUT OF YOUR APPLE ACCOUNT.6 Turn iCloud Drive off. Finally. Turn it back on. Pretend it's fine until it slowly locks up your entire fucking machine again. Sign back out of your Apple account (holy hell are you tempting fate here), turn iCloud Drive back off. Never, ever use it again. Don't trust it. Forget it exists. Realize how many of your apps use it in some capacity. Hope that they work well enough anyways. I miss when Dropbox was built in to everything. A convenient tire fire is still a tire fire. Was it an incompatible file? Maybe don't sync those. Don't mysteriously fail. It just works until it fails spectacularly.
Holy hell. So yes, yes Apple AI is unreliable. Of course it is. It's mediocre, it's half-baked and it's unreliable. AI is unreliable. It hallucinates, it reduces artwork to the mean. It gets answers wrong and it offers, hilarious, disturbing and hilariously disturbing summaries. I can't imagine Apple considers screenshots of its summarization failures getting shared around social media sites that consist of screenshots of other social media sites a success. I doubt that was the bar. The best part of Apple AI is that you can turn it off.
All of their services are abysmal. It's in the title. The title is a sign I can tap and it works reliably. Their services don't. They don't have to. There are more of them than you know.. They are there, they are the defaults and they succeed by being the defaults, by being built in. Here's a phone with 1 terabyte of storage and 5 gigabytes of iCloud storage. There's more if you pay for a subscription and well, that disparity is perverse.
Here you are with an expensive device — a premium device if the cost is the qualifying factor — and an increasing number of services that chip away at your wallet and are never more than mediocre and never reliable. Every new Apple service is an opportunity to grow service revenue. Every new service is an opportunity to gate functionality behind a subscription and every step taken to fight interoperability is an opportunity to keep users tethered.
This is long, it's running long – much like Apple's list of crappy services7. I've got Home, Siri, Wallet8 and FaceTime toggled on in my iCloud settings. I'd expect that count of switches to only ever go down.
Oh and fuck iCloud Drive.