5GB of iCloud frustration

Yesterday I got a call from a friend: she had just purchased a new iPhone and didn’t really know how she should move from her old iPhone 4s to her “new” iPhone 5s. Maybe I was naive, but I told her in a short iMessage that: she should just go to Settings > iCloud on her old phone, click on Backup now, wait a while and that her new iPhone would ask her to restore a backup upon first boot.I didn’t hear from her again, but the day after I got a second message: help. I’ve got no contacts and all my photos are gone on my new iPhone. Since these things are a LOT easier to troubleshoot with access to the devices themselves, and having known good wifi available, I told her to just come over, and that I’d sort things out. How difficult could it really be right?

Fast forward and this is what her old phone’s situation was: she had a 16Gb iPhone with 8GB of photos. iCloud was enabled, but she didn’t have iCloud Photo Library turned on. Her oldest backup was from January, a new backup would require 12GB of storage.She explained me that her iPhone warned her that her iStorage was full, but that even though she had deleted a lot of apps, she still couldn’t perform a backup.

Look Apple: a regular person does not get the difference between iCloud and local storage. And there is no way she would have figured out on her own that the only easy way to solve her situation was to upgrade her iCloud storage.

I tried to explain her that the easiest thing would be to buy more storage. But the didn’t like the idea of paying up. She had read about apps asking you for money repeatedly and didn’t trust those apps. And, from here point of viewm there’s no difference between an IAP in Clash of Clans, and an iCloud upgrade.

New tactic: I showed her my 45000+ photos in the Photos app and explained her I could have any photo I ever took on my iPhone and that they were also available on the iPad and that if I ever lost all my devices, I still had all my photos. Would she pay 10 euro a year for that?

She now has 50GB of iCloud storage, all her photos are synced to the new iPhone and safely in iCloud, it’s all backing up and IT JUST WORKS.

Conclusion: people don’t buy a service, they buy a solution. But if stupid limitations create a situation where they can’t even try out those features, they’ll never find out it offers a solution,m and they’ll never buy your service.If Apple had given my friend 15GB of iCloud storage for free, her iPhone would have backup up perfectly, iCloud Photo Library could have stored whatever she had saved on her iPhone before turning on sync, and she would have enjoyed using iCloud.But thanks to that stupid 5GB cap, she got frustrated and thought she did something wrong, and I spend an hour fixing something that is solved by spending 10 bucks a year.And I’m 100% sure that if she could have enjoyed using iCloud for free, she would have bought a storage upgrade on her own sooner or later.

If you can’t try out a service completely for free, you can’t enjoy the service, and you certainly won’t pay for it.