I am sure Apple has thousands of pages of 'USER REQUIREMENTS' for iCloud and iTunes Match. But the only one that REALLY ABSOLUTELY counts is reliability. I use iCloud email for important things, like for example, searching for a job. What if a prospective employer's inquiry is lost or significantly delayed? There are REAL WORLD consequences to these outages (some very severe) and Apple should be doing EVERYTHING and ANYTHING it takes to avoid them. Please excuse my shouting, but iCloud is a wonderful service, WHEN IT WORKS!

As for iTunes Match, the whole idea of the service is being able to access your music without cramming it into the limited onboard storage of an iOS device. Now when the service is down, you have no music to listen to, none at all. That is not progress. I personally will not be renewing my subscription to iTunes Match, so I am trying to identify similar services that are compatible with iOS devices, but that are less susceptible to outages. I'd like to ask about others' experiences with alternative services. Is Google's more reliable?

Originally Posted by davidlfoster

...As for iTunes Match, the whole idea of the service is being able to access your music without cramming it into the limited onboard storage of an iOS device. Now when the service is down, you have no music to listen to, none at all...

That is only partially right. On iOS devices, when you select a song to listen to from iTunes Match, it indeed downloads the song to your device and remains there. So if you lose connection or turn off iTunes Match, those previously played songs are still on your device, available to play. Of course, you're unable to listen to songs you've not asked to play prior.

You can check by going to Settings > Usage > Storage. You should see the memory amount used for stored songs (as well as other media such as videos, apps, etc.)