Apple has joined the Data Transfer Project, an initiative launched in 2018 to develop an open-source service-to-service data portability platform to allow people to easily move their data between online service providers.

As The Verge notes, Apple is now listed as a contributor alongside Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and others.



Apple will build systems that will make it easy to add and remove data from iCloud, similar to Google Takeout and Facebook's Access Your Information tool, which are compatible with one another and allow data to be downloaded to your hard drive.

Data Transfer Project is an open source initiative to encourage participation of as many Providers as possible. DTP will enhance the data portability ecosystem by reducing the infrastructure burden on both service providers and users which should in turn increase the number of services offering portability. The protocols and methodology of DTP enable direct, service-to-service data transfer with streamlined engineering work.

Eventually, the Data Transfer Project hopes that data will be able to be transferred directly from service to service with no need to download the data first.

Since the Data Transfer Project launched in July 2018 with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft on board, 18 contributors from a combination of partners and the open source community have inserted more than 42,000 lines of code and changed more than 1,500 files, and new framework features and APIs have been added.