How to Overcome a Sync Nightmare: A Developer’s Story

How A Realm iCloud Sync Failure Led to a Better Solution

My worst nightmare just came true.

For months, I’ve been using FocusPasta — the productivity app I’ve built — to track nearly every aspect of my life. Born out of my obsession with data (and pasta), it became my go-to app for tracking how I spend my time, from work to workouts to even FocusPasta development.

After months of usage, the daily charts painted a clear picture of how I spent my time. The jar charts were overflowing with pasta, and the yearly habit tracker was starting to fill up and reveal meaningful patterns in my routine.

Then, in one fleeting moment of stupidity, it all vanished. In the blink of an eye, I went from admiring my beautifully filled charts to staring at an empty screen, paralyzed by denial.

Months of data — gone. Just like that.

What’s worse than losing months of real data? Not even having a screenshot to remember it by. Enjoy this beautiful mock-up.

The Sync Struggles

This tragedy resulted from my attempts at implementing iCloud sync capabilities for FocusPasta.

When building FocusPasta, I chose Realm as my database over CoreData. There wasn’t any particular reason for this choice—FocusPasta doesn’t have complex data structures, and frankly, it didn’t really matter…