Sure, there’s plenty to love about iCloud -- after all, it’s a giant step up from Apple’s previous cloud efforts like MobileMe and .Mac and it’s free, so what’s to complain about? Unfortunately, iCloud can’t do everything, so here’s a look at what Apple doesn’t tell you about their cloud service.

“Automatic, effortless, and seamless -- it just works.” That’s how Apple’s marketing describes iCloud. We’ve got no beef with that marketing speak, given that iCloud has more pluses than minuses, especially considering that it’s free. But there may be a few things Apple isn’t telling you about iCloud -- as they say, the devil is always in the details.

It’s No Dropbox (or SugarSync, or Box)

We pretty much love Dropbox and cloud storage services like SugarSync and Box. They offer gigabytes of free space for syncing files between your computers and mobile devices -- drop a file into a folder at one place and it’s instantly shared with the others. While components of iCloud work like this -- Photo Stream and Documents in the Cloud come to mind -- Apple apparently doesn’t want users to have so much control over the process, and as such, there’s no way to create a Dropbox-style folder with iCloud. (To be fair, there’s a hacky workaround to access the sync folder used for Documents in the Cloud, but it’s hardly convenient.) So, while iCloud sync does exist, Apple doesn’t want users filling up their free 5GB bucket of data with media of their own choosing. How unfortunate…

App Updates Aren’t Automatic

Another iCloud feature we love are automatic downloads for music, apps and books, which is part of the iTunes in the Cloud offering. Buy an app on one device and it gets synced to all of your others (should you want it that way) and even dropped right into iTunes itself. The problem is, updates to those apps still require manual intervention -- as in, you have to explicitly call up the App Store Updates tab, check out what’s new and then choose to download them, either one at a time or all at once. (The other option is to download once in iTunes and then sync each device, but this is 2012 and we’re kind of over that now.) For most app updates -- the ones that fall under the 20MB download limit for 3G connections, for example -- we’d prefer to either be greeted by a push notification telling us an update is available or just make the magic happen while the device is otherwise idle, letting us know about it after the fact. (Even better would be the option of choosing on an app-by-app basis, like Android already does.)

You’ll Probably Need More Than 5GB of Space

We ported our MobileMe account to iCloud, which gave us an additional 20GB of storage on top of the free 5GB everyone gets. Even with four iOS devices being backed up to iCloud (our iPad 2, iPhone 4S and an older original iPad and iPhone 3GS we’ve jailbroken and unlocked for international travel), we’ve only used 5.1GB of data, with 19.1GB remaining, at least until our free MobileMe storage bump expires in June. Then what? We’ll be forced to remove a device or two, or worse yet, pony up $40 per year to keep that 25GB of space. Something tells us this is going to be a pretty common scenario later this year, especially among families who own an iPad (or two), an iPhone (or two) and maybe an iPod touch to boot. Suddenly, that free 5GB of storage doesn’t look quite so spacious, especially if you use a lot of apps that gobble it up quickly.

Want to Delete Photo Stream Images? Sorry, Charlie

Photo Stream is hands down one of the most desirable components of iCloud, and with good reason -- Apple doesn’t count this space against the 5GB it gives you for free, and stores the last 1,000 photos uploaded to it for 30 days, which is plenty of time to import them elsewhere. Awesome though it may be, Apple has once again hamstrung the feature by oversimplifying it. If you take a bunch of photos that don’t turn out and you delete them from your device after they’ve already been uploaded to Photo Stream, you’re stuck with them until the next 1,000 camera shots push ‘em into the ether. Sadly, there’s no way to delete individual images from your Photo Stream, although you can purge the entire collection at once -- but that’s a bit like taking a nuclear bomb to an anthill, we’d say.

Documents in the Cloud Won’t Collaborate with iWork for Mac

Another iCloud feature marred by Apple’s “keep it simple, stupid” philosophy is Documents in the Cloud. Perfect for roughing out a quick Pages, Numbers or Keynote document from your iPhone or iPod touch and then finishing it up on the iPad, but what about syncing those documents over the Mac version? Sorry, that’s (apparently) too complicated. You can upload documents created on the desktop through the iCloud website or use a kludgy hack for accessing the iCloud sync folder on your Mac, but what’s the point if it’s so difficult to do?

Syncing Contacts with Google? Not Bloody Likely

MobileMe was quite skilled at allowing third-party apps to sync its contacts and calendars with services such as Google. To be fair, calendar sync still works with something like Spanning Sync, but Apple completely demolished contact syncing with iCloud -- and has yet to fix it. Rather than maintaining an ongoing, automatic sync between iCloud and Google, users are now forced to maintain two separate contact lists -- one for iCloud and one for the Mac being used to sync from, resulting in duplicate contacts and a lot of heartbreak. There are workarounds for pushing your iCloud contact data to Google, but two-way, automatic sync remains as elusive as Sasquatch.

iCloud Backup Will Only Get You So Far

Backup may not sound like the sexiest feature of iCloud, since it won’t really come in handy until your next iPhone, iPad or iPod touch (assuming you don’t lose or destroy your current one before then). When that fateful day comes, you’ll be able to enter your iCloud credentials on the new device and magically watch your data reappear (as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection, that is). Camera roll photos and videos, device settings, app data, home screen and folders, messages and ringtones will all just port over, including music, TV shows, apps and books you’ve purchased from iTunes. And hey, if you pay $24.99 per year for iTunes Match, you’ll even have access to your entire music library, too. But what about movies, TV shows and photos you’ve synced over from iTunes? Sorry, pardner, you’ll have to wait until you get home to sync that stuff over from iTunes again. A small nuisance to be sure, especially given the bulging data size of movies and TV shows, but it sure would be nice for Apple to expand iCloud to include backups of everything on your device, should you want it.

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