Apple has joined the open-source Data Transfer Project. In 2018 tech giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter established this project. The project aimed to make it easier to port data in and out of different online services through the open-source platform.
Data Transfer Project
Started in 2018 the aim of the Data Transfer Project is to port data between two ecosystems easily and reduce the infrastructure burden on both service providers. Currently, you have to download data in your hard drive but Data Transfer Project hopes that data will be able to be transferred directly from service to service with no need to download the data first.
Data Transfer Project has mostly consisted of back-end coding to make data export tools like Google Takeout and Facebook’s Access Your Information tool compatible with each other. Means with the help of service-specific adapters, it sends data between services in a common format and again to the DSP’s API. For example, you can send all of your Facebook photos to a Google Photos account easily.
Since the Data Transfer Project launched in July 2018 with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft on board, 18 contributors from a combination of partners and the open-source community have inserted more than 42,000 lines of code and changed more than 1,500 files, and new framework features and APIs have been added.
Significant Of Apple’s Entry
Apple’s ecosystem is mainly closed. It’s very hard to transfer data from Apple’s framework to other frameworks. Now Apple will build systems that will make it easy to add and remove data from iCloud, similar to Google Takeout and Facebook’s Access Your Information too.
Google’s DTP lead, Jessie Chavez, told The Verge, “We’re really encouraged by the progress the Data Transfer Project has made since we announced it last year, and look forward to rolling out our first user-facing features in the coming months.” You can know more about it on the official website and GitHub Page.
