Apple indie app developers using CloudKit to keep their programs connected and up to date across Apple's ecosystem now have an extra feature to work with.

In a recent announcement, Apple says that third-party app developers can read and write to the CloudKit public database from a server-side process or script with a server-to-server key.

Launched in 2014, CloudKit was meant to provide developers with plenty of cloud storage for their users using their Apple apps. It was easy to set up, keep secure and scale as developers attracted more users to their apps.

Apple has used iCloud and CloudKit itself to launch its updated Photos app, which stores a user's photo library in an iCloud database that could be kept in sync and viewed between Apple devices and on the Web.

The development of the new Photos app eventually led to CloudKit getting outfitted with JavaScript and Web Services. This allowed developers to also create websites that displayed the same data to users who signed in with their Apple IDs.

That's also how we have Notes today, where we see whatever we have jotted down in the Notes app in a Web view online. It makes for a more convenient and enjoyable user experience where we aren't limited to just working on our smartphones since we can both access and edit our content on any device connected to the Internet.

With this latest CloudKit update feature, Apple allows developers to build apps and websites that store and modify data in Apple's iCloud servers.

Photos, for example, could act very much like Google's Photos app by providing cloud-based image processing. Similarly, the Notes app could update a user's notes with live data, or like Evernote, make use of optical character recognition in images.

Overall, this new layer of functionality allows Apple developers to better focus on their users by providing them with more client app features instead of having to spend that time dealing with server-side issues.

TAG Apple, CloudKit, iCloud

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