Chapter 17. iCloud

The free iCloud service stems from Apple’s brainstorm that, since it controls both ends of the connection between a Mac and the Apple website, it should be able to create some pretty clever Internet-based features.

This chapter concerns what iCloud can do for you, the iPhone owner.

Note

To get a free iCloud account if you don’t already have one, sign up in Settings→iCloud.

What iCloud Giveth

So what is iCloud? Mainly, it’s these things:

So there’s the quick overview. The rest of the chapter covers each of the iCloud iPhone-related features in greater depth—except Continuity, which gets its own chapter right after this one.

iCloud Sync

For many people, this may be the killer app for iCloud right here: The iCloud website, acting as the master control center, can keep multiple Macs, Windows PCs, and iPhones/iPads/iPod Touches synchronized. That offers both a huge convenience factor—all your stuff is always on all your gadgets—and a safety/backup factor, since you have duplicates everywhere.

It works by storing the master copies of your stuff—email, notes, contacts, calendars, web bookmarks, and documents—on the web. (Or “in the cloud,” as the product managers would say.)

Whenever your Macs, PCs, or i-gadgets are online—over Wi-Fi or cellular—they connect to the mother ship and update themselves. Edit an address on your iPhone, and shortly thereafter you’ll find the same change in Contacts (on your Mac) and Outlook (on your PC). Send an email reply from your PC at the office, and you’ll find it in your Sent Mail folder on the Mac at home. Add a web bookmark anywhere and find it everywhere else. Edit a spreadsheet in Numbers on your iPad and find the same numbers updated on your Mac.

Actually, there’s yet another place where you can work with your data: on the web. Using your computer, you can log into www.icloud.com to find web-based clones of Calendar, Contacts, and Mail.

To control the syncing, tap Settings→iCloud on your iPhone. Turn on the checkboxes of the stuff you want to be synchronized all the way around:

To set up syncing, turn on the switches for the items you want synced. That’s it. There is no step 2.

Note

You may notice that there are no switches here for syncing stuff you buy from Apple, like books, movies, apps, and music. They’re not so much synced as they are stored for you online. You can download them at any time to any of your machines.

My Photo Stream, Photo Sharing

These iCloud features are described in glorious detail in Chapter 10.

Find My iPhone

Did you leave your iPhone somewhere? Did it get stolen? Has that mischievous 5-year-old left it somewhere in the house again? Sounds like you’re ready to avail yourself of one of Apple’s finest creations: Find My iPhone.

The first step is to log into iCloud.com and click Find My iPhone. Immediately, the website updates to show you, on a map, the current location of your phone—and Macs, iPod Touches, and iPads. (If they’re not online, or if they’re turned all the way off, you won’t see their current locations.)

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If you own more than one, you may have to click All Devices and, from the list, choose the one you’re looking for.

If just knowing where the thing is isn’t enough to satisfy you, then click the dot representing your phone, click the next to its name, and marvel at the appearance of these three buttons:

Tip

There’s an app for that. Download the Find My iPhone app from the App Store. It lets you do everything described here from another iPhone, in a tidy, simple control panel.

Find My iPhone works great—as long as your lost phone has power, is turned on, and is online. Often, though, it’s lying dead somewhere, or it’s been turned off, or there’s no Internet service. In those situations, you might think Find My iPhone can’t help you.

But, thanks to Send Last Location, you still have a prayer of finding your phone again. Before it dies, your phone will send Apple its location. You have 24 hours to log into iCloud.com and use the Find My iPhone feature to see where it was at the time of death. (After that, Apple deletes the location information.)

You definitely want to turn this switch on.

Activation Lock

Thousands of people have found their lost or stolen iPhones by using Find My iPhone. Yay!

Unfortunately, thousands more will never see their phones again. Until recently, Find My iPhone had a back door the size of Montana: The thief could simply turn the phone off. Or, if your phone was password-protected, the thief could just erase it and sell it on the black market, which was his goal all along. Suddenly, your phone is lost in the wilderness, and you have no way to track or recover it.

That’s why Apple offers the ingenious Activation Lock feature. It’s very simple: Nobody can erase it, or even turn off Find My iPhone, without entering your iCloud password (your Apple ID). This isn’t a switch you can turn on or off; it’s always on.

So even if the bad guy has your phone and tries to sell it, the thing is useless. It’s still registered to you, you can still track it, and it still displays your message and phone number on the Lock screen. Without your iCloud password, your iPhone is just a worthless brick. Suddenly, stealing iPhones is a much less attractive prospect.

Email

Apple offers an email address as part of each iCloud account. Of course, you already have an email account. So why bother? The first advantage is the simple address: or .

Second, you can read your me.com email from any computer anywhere in the world, via the iCloud website, or on your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.

To make things even sweeter, your me.com or icloud.com mail is completely synced. Delete a message on one gadget, and you’ll find it in the Deleted Mail folder on another. Send a message from your iPhone, and you’ll find it in the Sent Mail folder on your Mac. And so on.

Video, Music, Apps: Locker in the Sky

Apple, if you hadn’t noticed, has become a big seller of multimedia files. It has the biggest music store in the world. It has the biggest app store, for both i-gadgets and Macs. It sells an awful lot of TV shows and movies. Its ebook store, iBooks, is no Amazon, but it’s chugging along.

Once you buy a song, movie, app, or book, you can download it again as often as you like—no charge. In fact, you can download it to your other Apple equipment, too—no charge. iCloud automates, or at least formalizes, that process. Once you buy something, it’s added to a list of items that you can download to all your other machines.

Here’s how to grab them:

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Tip

To make this automatic, open iTunes. Choose iTunes→Preferences→Downloads. Under Automatic Downloads, turn on Music, Apps, and Books, as you see fit. Click OK. From now on, iTunes will auto-import anything you buy on any of your other machines.

Any bookmark you set in an iBooks book is synced to your other gadgets, too. The idea, of course, is that you can read a few pages on your phone in the doctor’s waiting room and then continue from the same page on your iPad on the train ride home.

iCloud Drive

iCloud Drive is Apple’s version of Dropbox. It’s a single folder whose contents are replicated on every Apple machine you own—Mac, iPhone, iPad, iCloud.com—and even Windows PCs. See iCloud Drive for details.

The Price of Free

A free iCloud account gives you 5 gigabytes of online storage. That may not sound like much, especially when you consider how big some music, photo, and video files are. Fortunately, anything you buy from Apple—like music, apps, books, and TV shows—doesn’t count against that 5-gigabyte limit. Neither do the photos in your Photo Stream.

So what’s left? Some things that don’t take up much space, like settings, documents, and pictures you take with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch—and some things that take up a lot of it, like email, commercial movies, and home videos you transferred to the phone from your computer. Anything you put on your iCloud Drive eats up your allotment, too. (Your iPhone backup might hog space, but you can pare that down in Settings→iCloud→Storage→Manage Storage. Tap an app’s name and then tap Edit.)

You can, of course, expand your storage if you find 5 gigs constricting. You can expand that to 50 GB, 200 GB, a terabyte, or 2 TB—for $1, $3, $10, or $20 a month. You can upgrade your storage online, on your computer, or right on the iPhone (in Settings→iCloud→Storage→Buy More Storage).

Apple Pay

Breathe a sigh of relief. Now you can pay for things without cash, without cards, without signing anything, without your wallet: Just hold the phone. You don’t have to open some app, don’t have to enter a code, don’t even have to wake the phone up; just hold your finger on the Home button (it reads your fingerprint to make sure it’s you). You’ve just paid.

You can’t pay for things everywhere; the merchant has to have a wireless terminal attached to the register. You’ll usually know, because you’ll see the Apple Pay logo somewhere:

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Apple says more than two million stores and restaurants accept Apple Pay, including chains like McDonald’s, Walgreens, Starbucks, Macy’s, Subway, Panera Bread, Duane Reade, Bloomingdale’s, Staples, Chevron, and Whole Foods. The list grows all the time.

Apple Pay depends on a special chip in the phone: the NFC chip (near-field communication), and models before the iPhone 6 don’t have it. Stores whose terminals don’t speak NFC—like Walmart—don’t work with Apple Pay, either.

To set up Apple Pay, you have to teach your phone about your credit card. To do that, open the Wallet app. You can also start this process in Settings→Wallet & Apple Pay.

Tap Add credit or debit card. Tap Next.

Now, on the Add Card screen, you’re asked to aim the phone’s camera at whatever Visa, Mastercard, or American Express card you use most often. Hold steady until the digits of your card, your name, and the expiration date blink onto the screen, autorecognized. Cool! The phone even suggests a card description. You can manually edit any of those four fields before tapping Done.

Tip

If you don’t have the card with you, you can also choose Enter Card Details Manually and type in all the numbers yourself.

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Check over the interpretation of the card’s information, and then hit Next.

Now you have to type in the security code manually. Hit Next again. Then agree to the legalese screen.

Next, your bank has to verify that all systems are go for Apple Pay. That may involve responding to an email or a text, or typing in a verification code. In any case, it’s generally instantaneous.

Note

At the outset, Apple Pay works only with Mastercard, Visa, or American Express, and only the ones issued by certain banks. The big ones are all on board—Citibank, Chase, Bank of America, and so on—and more are signing on all the time.

You can record your store loyalty and rewards cards, too—and when you’re in that store, the phone chooses the correct card automatically. When you’re in Dunkin’ Donuts, it automatically uses your Dunkin’ Donuts card to pay.

Once the cashier has rung up your total, here comes the magic. Bring your iPhone near the terminal—no need to wake it—in any of these ways:

Either way, it’s just a regular credit card purchase. So you still get your reward points, frequent-flier miles, and so on. (Returning something works the same way: At the moment when you’d swipe your card, you bring the phone near the reader until it beeps. Slick.)

Apple points out that Apple Pay is much more secure than using a credit card, because the store never sees, receives, or stores your credit card number, or even your name. Instead, the phone transmits a temporary, one-time, encoded number that means nothing to the merchant. It incorporates verification codes that only the card issuer (your bank) can translate and verify.

And, by the way, Apple never sees what you’ve bought or where, either. You can open Wallet and tap a card’s picture to see the last few transactions), but that info exists only on your iPhone.

And what if your phone gets stolen? Too bad—for the thief. He can’t buy anything without your fingerprint. If you’re still worried, you can always visit iCloud.com, click Settings, tap your phone’s name, and click Remove All to de-register your cards from the phone by remote control.

Apple Pay Online

You can buy things online, too, using iPhone apps that have been upgraded to work with Apple Pay. The time savings this time: You’re spared all that typing of your name, address, and phone number every time you buy something.

Instead, when you’re staring at the checkout screen for some app, just tap Buy with Apple Pay. It lets you pay for stuff without having to painstakingly type in your name, address, and credit card information 400 times a year. And if you’re shopping on a Mac (and it doesn’t have its own fingerprint reader), you can authenticate with your phone’s fingerprint reader!

Family Sharing

If you have kids, it’s always been a hassle to manage your Apple life. What if they want to buy a book, movie, or app? They have to use your credit card—and you have to reveal your iCloud password to them.

Or what if they want to see a movie that you bought? Do they really have to buy it again?

Not anymore. Once you’ve turned on Family Sharing and invited your family members, here’s how your life will be different:

  • One credit card to rule them all. Up to six of you can buy books, movies, apps, and music on your master credit card.

  • Ask before buy. When your kids try to buy stuff, your phone pops up a permission request. You have to approve each purchase.

  • Younger Appleheads. Within Family Sharing, you can now create Apple accounts for tiny tots; 13 is no longer the age minimum.

  • Shared everything. All of you get instant access to one another’s music, video, iBooks books, and app purchases—again, without having to know one another’s Apple passwords.

  • Find one another. You can use your phone to see where your kids are, and vice versa (with permission, of course).

  • Find one another’s phones. The miraculous Find My iPhone feature (My Photo Stream, Photo Sharing) now works for every phone in the family. If your daughter can’t find her phone, you can find it for her with your phone.

  • Mutual photo album, mutual calendar, and mutual reminders. When you turn on Family Sharing, your Photos, Calendar, and Reminders apps each sprout a new category that’s preconfigured to permit access by everyone in your family.

The setup process means wading through a lot of screens, but at least you’ll have to do it only once. You can turn on this feature either on the Mac (in System Preferences→Set Up Family) or on the phone itself. Since this book is about the iPhone, what follows are the steps to do it there.

In Settings→iCloud, tap Set Up Family Sharing. Click Get Started. Now the phone informs you that you, the sage adult, are going to be the Organizer—the one with the power, the wisdom, and the credit card. Continue (unless it’s listing the wrong Apple ID account, in which case, you can fix it now).

On successive screens, you read about the idea of shared Apple Store purchases; you’re shown the credit card that Apple believes you want to use; you’re offered the chance to share your location with the others. Each time, read and tap Continue.

Finally, you’re ready to introduce the software to your family.

You can, of course, repeat this cycle to add additional family members, up to a maximum of six. Their names and ages appear on the Family screen.

From here, you can tap someone’s name to perform stunts like these:

Once kids turn 13, by the way, Apple automatically gives them more control over their own lives. They can, for example, turn off Ask To Buy themselves, on their own phones. They can even express their disgust for you by leaving the Family Sharing group. (On her own phone, for example, your daughter can visit Settings→iCloud→Family, tap her name, and then tap Leave Family. Harsh!)

Once everything’s set up, here’s how you and your nutty kids will get along.