NetNewsWire Help

iCloud Syncing Limitations and Solutions

The Problem

If you’re syncing using iCloud and the progress indicator appears stalled with no new articles appearing, it’s because iCloud syncing is sometimes extraordinarily slow.

This is most apparent when adding an iCloud account to a new device after you have been using iCloud sync on another device for some time.

Apple limits how fast you can retrieve updates from their iCloud servers, presumably to prevent abuse. This can impact the speed of NetNewsWire iCloud syncing, especially with an established account with history.

Handling Long Sync Times

With Apple’s limits, sync times can take hours and hours as they force limits on data transfer. The more data in iCloud, the longer the sync time. Long syncs have been known to take more than 24 hours.

Larger numbers of unread articles cause a lot of data to be stored in iCloud. This is because we sync the article content of unread items. We do this so that if an article has dropped off of the RSS feed by the time another device syncs, that article will still appear on that other device. We compress the article content to make this take less time. Still, the fewer unread articles that you keep around, the faster syncing will be.

Since iCloud syncing can be frustrating long, we will give you a couple of tips to help.

Mac

Launch NetNewsWire and don’t close it until the sync is complete. If you close it before the sync is complete, you will have to start all over again.

iPhone and iPad

Dealing with long sync times can be a little tricky on iPhones and iPads. These devices work hard to preserve battery life and don’t work well with long running processes. If you switch away from NetNewsWire or let your devices display go to sleep, you won’t complete a long running sync.

Our advice is do the following procedure right before you go to bed.

  1. Go to Settings and set Auto-Lock to Never in the Display & Brightness section.
  2. Plug your device in. Because the screen will be on all night it will drain your battery to zero if you don’t.
  3. Launch NetNewsWire and leave it in the foreground. Don’t switch away from NetNewsWire or you will have to start over.
  4. Get some sleep.
  5. If you have an average amount of data the sync should be done by the time you get up.
  6. Reset your Auto-Lock to your preferred setting.

Go Nuclear

This really is not recommended, but if you get desperate, you can start over from scratch.

  1. Export an OPML file of your current iCloud account.
  2. Delete all iCloud accounts from NetNewsWire on all of your devices.
  3. Under Settings, go to your Apple ID and select iCloud. Select Manage Account Storage (Manage… on macOS) and look for NetNewsWire. Select it and then delete your NetNewsWire data from iCloud.
  4. On one device, create a new iCloud account.
  5. Import your OPML file from Step 1.
  6. When that completes, you can start adding iCloud accounts back to your other devices.

Consider Alternate Account Types

If you find that iCloud is too slow or just doesn’t work for you, we recommend trying one of the other syncing systems. NetNewsWire supports all the common ones including Feedbin, Feedly, and more. These systems don’t have the same bandwidth constraints that iCloud does — they sync much faster.

Many have free tiers of usage. Subscription prices range from about $3 per month for a basic service to $5 or $6 for the premium ones. The premium ones provide many valuable features not possible to build using iCloud. Cross platform support, a good web interface, and newsletter support are just a couple features you can get at the premium services but not with iCloud.