ricloud API FAQ

ricloud is the name for Reincubate's Cloud Data API. The API enables users to easily access data from iOS devices over Wi-Fi, USB or through an iCloud connection.

Client support is available by email at ent-support@reincubate.com and via private Slack integration channels. Clients can contact the support team to arrange setup of the integration channel.

We maintain a status page at status.reincubate.com. The status pages allows users to subscribe to updates. Updates are sent for any planned or emergency maintenance.

The Reincubate engineering team primarily use Python. Consequently the most sophisticated sample client implementations are built in Python, although there's no hard reason to use language. The API is used by clients running .NET / C#, PHP, Python, Java and JavaScript / Node.js.

The ricloud API's infrastructure is hosted by a number of providers in the US, EU and Canada, including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. We host many North American clients with GCP, and client bandwidth costs can be reduced where they choose buckets to match the same region as we host in.

We recommend clients use hosting partners with tier 1 peering to ensure reliable, high-bandwidth access.

Apple locks iCloud accounts with a variety of frequencies based on a large and dynamic set of criteria. Broadly, these fall into three categories:

1. The way in which a piece of technology communicates
2. The nature of the infrastructure used to communicate
3. The rhythm, patterns and frequency with which that technology communicates

ricloud API addresses all three as they evolve. The first is handled by the proprietary code behind the API, and the second by the substantial and complex infrastructure stack that Reincubate maintain. However, when directly controlling the API, clients may struggle to manage #3 at scale or in use-cases that require regular polling.

The ricloud scheduling service is designed to manage this for clients, and is recommended over direct access for these use-cases.

A small but consistent number of end-user accounts are registered with the API whilst already being locked, and some end-users use a number of tools to access their iCloud accounts simultaneously. Where end-users do this they are likely to end up with account locks.

There are a number of best practices for use to make the most of ricloud API.

• Make use of this documentation. Many of the common questions are answered in these materials, and the documentation is regularly updated.
• The API status page can be used to sign up for updates on any planned or emergency API maintenance.
• Clients that take advantage of a Slack integration channel tend to go live sooner.
• The Open Source client provides a full example of an integration with the ricloud service, and examining that (or re-using code from it) can save a lot of work during the integration.
• Follow security and privacy best practice, and do not store end-user credentials. Instead, use the tokenisation system.
• Don't hard-code the task submission or results endpoints in requests: whilst they may often take the same value, the API may vary them from time to time.
• Don't generate more tasks than are necessary: for instance, polling for backup updates is unnecessary more than a few times per day, and a lot can be done to devise an accurate schedule for this. The API is capable of completing a large number of tasks and generating a lot of data in a small amount of time.
• Reincubate considers it a best practice to directly contact account holders at such times as their accounts are first accessed, and then on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are informed client activity. See enhancing privacy for more details.

No. Feed and file data is streamed to client buckets and not persisted in the RI stack.

In some cases the API will persist some metadata, most notably where the scheduler retains a rolling window of metadata to help it calculating accurate polling windows.

Trial key limits can vary according to the nature of the key. They may be limited by:

• Number of devices or accounts accessible via the key
• Support for non-2FA/2SV accounts (eg. trial users can be prevented from accessing non-2FA accounts for compliance reasons)

If you are seeing an empty response from ricloud, and not an error, it means that the data source was empty. To make sure data is available and ready for ricloud to retrieve, try steps listed below.

For iOS versions 10.2 and earlier, the iCloud settings can be found under Settings > iCloud. For iOS versions 10.3 and later, these were moved to Settings > [user name] > iCloud.

1. Make sure that the associated setting for the data type is turned on.
   • For data types where the source is an iOS device backup, this means turning on iCloud backups in Settings > [user name] > iCloud > iCloud Backup > iCloud Backup and making sure the device has been backed up at least once. A backup can be triggered manually by pressing the Back Up Now button on the aforementioned screen.
   • For realtime and near-time data types, the settings tend to be more specific to the service responsible for syncing the data with iCloud. For example, the setting associated with Find My iPhone can be found under Settings > [user name] > iCloud > Find My iPhone > Find My iPhone. The associated setting is listed alongside other data type properties in the services documentation.
2. Make sure the device gets opportunities to sync data.
   • For iCloud backup based feeds, the device needs to be plugged-in and locked to begin an automatic iCloud backup. You can still trigger a manual backup at any time.
   • For realtime and near-time data types, sync triggers vary depending on the service design. In general, it can take around 4-6 hours for some of the slower sync processes to run.