the only Apple-native alternatives: asking users to upgrade iCloud+ the best option for individual privacy   moving shared/team data to publicCloudDatabase seems like the worst, since all privacy is lost   or using a third-party/app-managed backend? someone still has to pay for it, and security and privacy are hard to implement well. There's a fourth option, which is to make the coach the owner of the data, who shares with each athlete. This lines up with your business model where the coach is your customer.

syncing CloudKit with something local, e.g. CoreData, is already hard, and none of Apple's first-party solutions handle upload or download of large data files asynchronously. For inspiration, check out the open source project CloudCore, which implements cacheable assets using long-lived CloudKit operations.

FWIW, I've built out my own sync solution between CoreData and CloudKit, and it took some considerable forethought to support background uploads and downloads of binary data, separate from syncing CKRecord changes over time. CloudCore manages its own CKFetch and CKModify operations like so… func longLivedConfiguration(qos: QualityOfService) -> CKOperation.Configuration { let configuration = CKOperation.Configuration() configuration.container = container configuration.isLongLived = true configuration.qualityOfService = qos return configuration } record["asset"] = CKAsset(fileURL: cacheable.url) uploadOp = CKModifyRecordsOperation(recordsToSave: [record]…) uploadOp.configuration = self.longLivedConfiguration(qos: .utility) uploadOp.savePolicy = .changedKeys It would be great to know if/when NSCloudKitContainer handles something like this.

Make this function handle nil values for largeImageURL and thumbnailURL… override func addAssetsToRecord(_ record: CKRecord) { // add the image data as CKAssets if let largeImageURL, let thumbnailURL { let largeAsset = CKAsset(fileURL: largeImageURL) let thumbAsset = CKAsset(fileURL: thumbnailURL) record.setObject(largeAsset, forKey: "largeImage") record.setObject(thumbAsset, forKey: "thumbnailImage") } else { record.setObject(nil, forKey: "largeImage") record.setObject(nil, forKey: "thumbnailImage") } another way is to just delete the ImageAsset CKRecord itself, which will also orphan the CKAssets.

can you show some code?

back in my SceneKit days, I had to turn to SCNTechnique to make something like this, with a sequence of render passes processing the geometry data. Would love to hear that RealityKit has something like this built in. fwiw.

How can I check if the data is actually stored in the cloud https://icloud.developer.apple.com/dashboard

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/288 this is Apple's official statement on SceneKit.

Where you are using CKRecordZoneSubscription to sync the private database, you can use CKDatabaseSubscription to sync shared databases. See CloudCore for an example. Are you syncing CloudKit to CoreData? I create an observer singleton with a FetchedResultsController, detecting when changes occur in the root object (as synced from CloudKit), and post local notifications as appropriate. See CarShuffle for an example

you're jumping into a background thread, then accessing CoreData using the viewContext, which should only be used on the main thread.

nvrmnd

Look at using these in your modelComponent: MeshResource, MeshResource.Contents, MeshResource.Part e.g. func meshContents() -> MeshResource.Contents { // update mesh data … var meshPart = MeshResource.Part(…) meshPart.positions = .init(positions) meshPart.textureCoordinates = MeshBuffer(textureCoordinates) meshPart.triangleIndices = .init(indices) var contents = MeshResource.Contents() contents.models = [.init(…, parts: [meshPart])] return contents } let meshResource = try await MeshResource(from: meshContents()) let modelComponent = ModelComponent(mesh: meshResource, …) for loop { try modelComponent.mesh.replace(with: meshContents()) }

look at NSCompountPredicate

my guess is the web client to CloudKit is like any other client, and likely decrypts the data on display. better to ask, is the data encrypted in transit? You could use a packet sniffer to intercept the requests to/from CloudKit, and verify the encrypted fields are not cleartext.

my code calls player.prepareToPlay explicitly, fwiw