If you go from USA to EU or vice versa it means a latency of at least 100ms. It also depends on where those servers are. Moreover, silent background pushes are not reliable either, as iOS does not always guarantee a handler trigger when the device is not charging, but aggressively drops the silent pushes based on the app’s history of signal, power and data costs in background. But CloudKit’s problem is that it is restricted to only non-MAS versions. For instance, per my observation, the Due 2.0 app (seemingly) uses CloudKit’s subscription to push sync signals, and Dropbox’s API to delta sync its database. Having that said, with the introduction of CloudKit, the lack of pushes for file-based synchronisation can be mitigated.

But a hit in sync time has to be taken, as there is no smart worker in the cloud to prepare everything for you. On the other hand, apps like OmniFocus and 2Do rely on more or less client-only, file-based synchronization, so that a proprietary back-end service isn’t needed (in Omni’s case, you can easily build your own “backend”, i.e. These services may have implemented their own cloud back-end that can prepare delta changes on-the-fly for sync. You can therefore apparently speed up the process by opening OmniFocus more often, but it still won’t provide an instant sync since there are no Push Notifications being employed. Unfortunately, that’s not even end-user controllable, but is determined by iOS itself based on some Apple algorithm that tries to see when and how often you open the app yourself. Until then, however, OmniFocus relies on the built-in background sync in iOS that schedules it to fire up periodically and check for new data. Omni has said they could theoretically do something like this with their Omni Sync Server, but it would make OmniFocus more dependent on that and would exclude those users who want to store their OmniFocus database on their own server, or some other WebDAV server, for whatever reasons (often privacy). It’s more proprietary, but it allows them to take advantage of things like iOS Push Notifications for informing iOS devices that new data is available to be synced. You’re syncing using their own “sync language” if you will, as opposed to simply uploading data to a file server. Other apps like Things, Wunderlist, etc., have deployed their own custom protocols and servers. Yes, Omni deployed the Omni Sync Server a while back, but that’s really just a WebDAV server, and the goal of OmniFocus’ original design was to allow you to store your data wherever you want.

The issue, as I understand it, is that OmniFocus doesn’t have a “custom” cloud server where your database is stored. This was discussed in another thread somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it right now…

Gtd 2do