Lately I have been experiencing lots of problems with iPad OS on my iPad Pro. Many of these problems seem to relate to iCloud. When I am using an iCloud enabled application the app will lose their ability to sync with iCloud. The iCloud enabled documents will not load. This makes using iPad more frustrating and also gives me the Windows nostalgia that I did not miss. At least Apple support gave me a pattern to tackle these issues.
On Sunday I went to start reading a book with the Apple Books application. The books I purchased from the Apple Store worked but the ePub and PDFs I downloaded from third parties did not open. I could try and delete them or make changes to my Books library but they would not be reflected in iCloud. After spending an hour with Apple Support I learned the fix to this is to delete the Books application, shut down my iPad and let it sit for a couple minutes to clear its caches. Then when I booted the iPad I re-installed books. It works now, but it is frustrating this happened in the first place.
I typically write these blog posts in iA Writer. I will draft my initial thoughts on iPad and then take the document from iCloud and move it to my blog on my MacBook Pro. Lately when attempting to open iCloud documents on iPad I would just get a blank screen. This felt similar to the issue in Books to me. So I tried the same troubleshooting steps: delete the app, restart iPad, and reinstall the app. It worked, but was the second time I had to restart my iPad to get it working. It feels like something is broken with iCloud.
Finally I often use my iPhone as a hotspot for my iPad. I used to be able to just go to the settings screen and select my iPhone connection from it. Now I need to open the hotspot settings on iPhone to see it as an option on iPad. This is much less convenient. I really miss not having to interact with my iPhone to turn on the hotspot. I did just find a thread on Apple Support that suggested logging out and back into iCloud that might have fixed this.
While Apple support was great in helping me fix all these issues, it is certainly frustrating to have them repeat.