Wow yikes, sorry for the above formatting. Tried to quote your replies and respond, but the forums just mashed all the lines together. Hope it makes sense.

No. In fact 15s is pretty good for end to end with CloudKit. Ok, good to know, thanks! Near real time use cases can use GameKit or similar for faster communication latencies between proximal devices. Yeah, I ended up playing with Multipeer Connectivity framework and it works great for my particular use-case here. Is your simulator signed in to an iCloud account? Yes (in fact I have to sign into my account on the simulator every 24hrs... is this a bug?) - and I am under the impression that push notifications don't work at all in the simulator, and there are docs (I'm pretty sure?) that say CloudKit sync notifs aren't supported on simulator.. so I'm surprised you seems to be indicating that it should work on sim?