[Discussion] fileproviderd and macOS' Evolution

TL;DR: Apple compels lockdown of cloud storage. It's all worse. Discussion in second paragraph.

Apple has introduced a new subsystem for Cloud storage providers including Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc which requires a switch to Apple's own method for syncing files to the cloud. fileproviderd is the daemon which handles this and it is a massive resource hog, especially when dealing with large files (> 1gb). The insult, in addition to resource utilisation, is that this new system introduced by Apple is substantially slower and less reliable than the solutions offered by these companies previously. For example, if I have program which accesses dozens of files to read instead of parallelising them well so dozens of small files can load concurrently with a 22gb file, the whole system hangs. Unusable, and a common use case. Similarly, it is no longer possible to pause upload which still allowing download. Most connections are no symmetrical. I don't want to be working at a coffee shop an nuke speed by uploading a huge file, even if I still want access to a number of text files.

I am worried about what this means for us as consumers. Being able to use cloud storage providers that operated differently than Apple did was a plus and gave us freedom as consumers. If every cloud provider is essentially an ersatz version of iCloud, then we as the consumer lose. It's like web browsers on iOS: Apple has forced them to all be second class citizens by requiring them to use the Safari render engine, except with second class access to it. Not all of us work with only Mac users and many of us are not the lowest common denominator of consumer. Apple has a conflict of interest and it's showing now as they drive us to use their services by handicapping competitors.