Open Radar

 
We have a situation where a document is created on iPhone from one or more pictures (2MB each), and the document is stored in iCloud.

As soon as the document is created on the iPhone, the Mac gets notified and shows the Handoff icon. But when that icon is clicked, the document cannot be opened (open failure) as it needs to be transferred to the Mac first (happens automatically in the background). The transfer takes about 20-30 seconds.

For most users, it means we have a non-functional Handoff icon on the Mac when creating new documents.

We tried an alternative way of creating an empty document (that is fast to transfer), so the Mac can open it before the images are part of it. But then, the Mac document only receives the actual images inside that document after 30 seconds. Which again, to the user, looks like there was a problem because he only sees empty document for 30 seconds without any notification of pending transfer.

Because most of the file opening and iCloud transfer is handled by AppKit on the Mac, we really think the transfer process should be handled by the framework (progress should be displayed to show the pending transfer of the file after clicking the handoff icon).

For now we are removing the Handoff feature for newly created document, and only keep it for previously created ones, to avoid poor user experience and the need to explain the situation.