Anki Cloud Storage

[Sinister]

By default in Anki, you can set up custom servers to use as the target for syncing.

Would you consider allowing users to use their preferred cloud storage, such as iCloud?

iCloud has end-to-end encryption even for application syncing like Anki. This way, users can sync their platforms while still having complete control over their data and its encryption.

[ferophila]

Why not iCloud Sync?

TL;DR Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be an improvement. There are two ways a user can experience a sync system: either the syncing is completely automated, or it has to be (more or less) manually triggered. For instance, if you turn on icloud sync, you usually don’t even need to actually trigger the sync. When a file is modified, it will automatically gets synced. This is possible because it will assume your are only modifying the file at one location: for each device, either you are modifying t…

Anki auto sync on IOS/IPADOS

iCloud is not practical - it would either require uploading/downloading your entire collection each time you synced (slow and bandwidth consuming), or it would require rewriting Anki’s data model to work with iCloud, which isn’t really possible, as Anki needs to work on more than just Apple devices.

[Sinister]

I won’t address that first comment since it’s mostly speculative and doesn’t really articulate any challenges.

As for the second comment, I can respect that Anki needs to work on more than just Apple devices, and I also think it’s fair to acknowledge that the platform is charged for on Apple devices. Rather than uploading/downloading the entire collection, there are better alternatives.

Currently, with AnkiWeb, there does not need to be a complete re-download/re-upload on each sync. My proposal is to have a custom server instance like the Anki manual describes creating, but have its filesystem on iCloud. Then have each platform (iOS, Mac, whatever) spin up that server locally, connect to itself, and then perform the sync operations.

I think this solves all of the listed concerns, but may generate other ones.