My Battle With MobileMe. Or: Why I Want To Strangle A Developer

Apple and I just aren't getting along. We really aren't. I'm not sure what it is, and I'm not sure why it happens, but we just can't get close. I've tried! When I go home at night, I'll occasionally poke around on my boyfriend's Mac (don't tell him, but I found his porn stash), I had an iPod (who doesn't), and I even finally caved and picked up an iPhone 3G when they released. But damned if I don't run into problems all the time with my Apple products.

Today was no different. You see, I had signed up for MobileMe about a month and a half ago. When they announced MobileMe, I was pretty excited about it and even announced on one of our podcasts that I'd be all about it when it released. I figured, worst case scenario, I have three free months to play around with it and find out if I can actually make use of it. Well, a month and a half in, and this morning I decided to pull the plug. I wasn't using it and couldn't really find a great use for it, and it wouldn't sync wirelessly very frequently and I couldn't really justify the $99. So, when I got up this morning, I pulled up my MobileMe control panel and cancelled the service, then left the house for work.

Let me just say this: if you cancel your MobileMe through the control panel, make sure to delete it from your phone and sync back to your computer before you leave the house. That said, about half way through this this morning, I noticed that my contacts were gone from my phone. I was getting text messages from nine-digit numbers rather than people, and I no longer had the ability to look up people in my Address Book. I was freaking out! I called my boyfriend, who had previously experienced an issue with his contacts disappearing for a brief period, and asked him what to do, and what he had to say didn't make me too happy.

We discovered that I had made the fatal error of not deleting MobileMe from my phone before I left the house. Why is this such a big deal if I cancelled my subscription? Well, when you're a MobileMe customer, all your contacts are stored in the cloud. Your phone syncs to that cloud data periodically to make sure that the contacts on your phone match you cloud contacts and your computer contacts. Guess what happens if you cancel the cloud piece of it though and don't clue in your phone that it shouldn't go fetching data? It gets no data, and syncs back to your phone with zero contacts. This is where annoyed Jesse James took over.

Luckily, when I get home, all my contacts should still be stored in Outlook, so I should be able to sync my phone via USB, and all should be good with the world. In the meantime, I'm stuck wondering who exactly is texting me. I would seriously have appreciated a warning window or something when I opted out of MobileMe this morning. Or a message on my phone asking if I had really deleted all my contacts. Those are the kinds of subtle things that developers think of in testing, and as we all know, MobileMe wasn't the most tested service Apple has ever rolled out, even by their own admission.

What's the lesson here kids? Don't bother with MobileMe. But if you do, make sure you take every possible precaution, because you aren't going to get any warning if you make a boo boo. No long term harm will come of it, but temporary stress and a little bit of panic might overtake you.