Recently, Apple announced their cloud service offerings for iOS 5. It seems like every piece of content will now be backed up to a cloud server, and able to sync to other iOS (and possibly Mac and PC?) devices.

This is great, but as a long-time cloud user, I don’t like a non-standard approach to accessing my remote content. For example, can I connect via FTP or http to view all of my data? Or do I need to have a compatible OS/device to sync it down? Will there be an API to obtain my data?

If not, it feels a lot like vendor lock-in disguised as something else.

I’ll definitely use the service, but will continue with my normal file backup procedures using Amazon S3, Box.net, and Google Docs.

Apple’s cloud service is more of a sync service, if anything.