Can I access standard iOS Notes and Reminders' data using CloudKit web services or something like that?

Question

I am thinking of building an Android app that fetches Notes and Reminders associated with an Apple ID. Is it possible to access them with http requests somehow? icloud.com uses their data, so I thought maybe it is exposed via some API, but I cannot find any documentation.

Answer 1

There is none. The only thing exposed so far is the CloudKit api which is for accessing key value data that you created yourself.

If you want to access reminders, then you can use the iOS native api: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DataManagement/Conceptual/EventKitProgGuide/ReadingAndWritingReminders/ReadingAndWritingReminders.html

Answer 2

A hacky solution that I use for getting the reminders I create or mark as done is IFTTT (https://ifttt.com/). You can download it on your phone. This has the option to get the reminders values out to a google document, google sheet or other place that you can later easily grab from with the google API. That is what I am currently doing. In addition if your intention is to create reminders you can use pyicloud (https://github.com/picklepete/pyicloud). Its small project that I am also using. Feel free to contribute!

Answer 3

I know that some may not like this answer, as it may be a very gray area, but assuming you had the user’s permission, you might be able to make your own API with a scraper tool that can expose an API to the data. This way you can make an Android app that accesses the user’s iOS data via the icloud.com site and then allows them to use it/manage it via your app on their Android devices.

Do a search for scrape tools and you’ll find loads of them available now. Their pricing often includes a free tier that may or may not be adequate for your purposes. ParseHub is a great one. There’s others out there that can get around certain troublesome limitations of the browser that ParseHub has if you find yourself stuck.

If the app you make has good success then it may be a good investment to pay for the upgrades.