For the past 4 years, there has been one online subscription I’ve been thrilled to pay for each year: Ulysses. It is, by far, the best writing app I’ve come across. The interface is clean, and it’s a canvas that I enjoy coming to every day to write this blog.
Sadly, they’ve messed up and lost my trust.
A few bits of context first. Ulysses is Mac only. Focusing on one operating system is a bold position to take in a market where 72% of people use Windows. However, as someone who supports software teams building across three different operating systems, focusing only on one has huge advantages.
Secondly, Ulysses use iCloud sync to ensure content is saved and accessible across all Apple devices. If you have a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, all of your writing should be available to you within seconds. And this is where Ulysses has lot my trust.
For the past 2-3 months, iCloud sync has not worked. The content on my phone and Mac have been out of step with each other. And as someone who likes to write both on-the-go as well as at my desk, it’s critical that I have the ability to start writing a blog post on my phone and then pick it up from my MacBook later in the day.
I emailed Ulysses about the issue, and I got a standard boiler plate reply. I tried the solutions they recommended, but I’m still facing the same issues months later.
As someone who has a particular date and filing system for my posts, and someone who cares deeply about keeping an accurate record of my writing, this lack of reliability in the service is a real sore spot.
With any other product or service, I’d wash my hands with it and switch to another app, but the daily writing experience on Ulysses is so good that I don’t want to switch. So, I’ll end up migrating the storage of my posts to an external source like Dropbox, which has sub-optimal security, storage, and sync functionality compared to iCloud (at least when iCloud is working!).
The point here is not to complain about Ulysses and my particular issue with iCloud sync. But it’s rather to comment more broadly on how a company that does one thing so well—dare I say, spectacularly well—can break trust with customers on a reliability issue that is unrelated to the core product experience.