Advice on sharing data between apps NSPersistantCloudkit container or App groups or both?

I have several different apps that I'd like to share a personal core data store with on the same device and across devices. I've been experimenting with NSPersistentCloudKitContainer, which seems to work, but it can take a while to sync and it's not clear when it has. I have also experimented with using app groups where the SQLite file is placed in the app group so that changes are immediately available to other apps on the device.

My question is whether it is better to do one or the other or both. Will two apps open on the same device accessing the shared SQLite cause conflict issues? Do I even need to sync data with cloudKit if I'm already syncing with a shared group? Using NSPersistentCloudKitContainer alone means that each app will be syncing its own copy of the data locally, which doesn't seem very efficient and again I don't know if it's synched when I open the other app up. But I have seen conflicts when i have both apps open at the same time. Is there a foolproof way to prevent conflicts when one app goes into the background?