Since a few month I am now trying to work with Apple’s MobileMe service. My main motivation was the purchase of an iPhone, and I finally wanted to have a working and easy to use service managing and syncing my calendar and contacts. Unfortunately, so far it turned out to be one of the crappiest service I have ever seen.

To my setup: in addition to the mentioned iPhone I am mainly using Linux at home and in the office. It was not a surprise that Apple does only support Mail, Address Book, and iCal on a Mac, and Microsoft Outlook on a PC (Windows XP or Windows Vista). But, hey, they also have a Web client at http://www.me.com/, and for me a working web client seemed more than sufficient. So I was willing to pay the annual 79,00 € here in Germany.

The first major surprise was that Apple does only officially support Safari and Firefox browsers on a Mac or PC! WTF!

The last time I saw a message like "this site is optimized for Web Browser XYZ" is at least 5 years ago. Nowadays every run-of-the-mill web developer knows that restricting to a specific browser is a no-go. Not so Apple.

But at first I thought this might be more of a warning which can be safely ignored, like "we do not officially support it, but it works fine". Bogus! MobileMe is absolutely unusable at least under Firefox (and relatives) and Opera under Linux. Here are the main reasons:

  • Changes made to a contact or calendar get regularly lost. The browser constantly reloads the whole page, and then it comes to a surprise if your changes are still there.
  • The whole service is terribly slow.
  • Often the service does not work at all.
  • Basic functionality is missing, like dealing with calendar invites.

I would not even call this beta. This is just embarrassing. And you have to pay for this!

And, what is somewhat worst, your private data is handled absolutely irresponsibly. This became more than apparent a few days ago, when the Web client of MobileMe suddenly showed me the address book of a completely different person (I have no clue who this person is). Here a screenshot:
 

 

That were more than 100 names belonging to someone others address book, and at least the first one was also shown in detail. So, I wonder who sees my addresses once in a while… This is absolutely unacceptable, and one of the worst failures I have seen so far, brought to you by one of the leading software development companies.

For now I can only disadvice to use MobileMe, also not on a Mac or PC, since Apple seems to have serious problems running the service and ensuring your data security. And due to the resitrictive access policy to the iPhone’s app store, iPhone users are at the mercy of this crappy application. But there seem to be alternatives, at least for contact management, Funambol looks interesting.