syncthing-android

Seems like I hadn't switched away from the previously official Play store app (v 1.27.3) [0] archived on 2024-12-03. [0]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android

Google - if you're out there - stop being such absolute effing jerks to your users. A lot of us actually want to run apps with full access to our system. The kind of access your own backend has with features like cloud backup. Syncthing already abandoned their Android app because of this nonsense (as jfim pointed out: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064)

Drive doesn't sync arbitrary files on Android though. A closer analogue to what nextcloud is trying to do would be syncthing, who also discontinued its Android app due to issues with getting the proper permissions with the play store (see https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064).

Note that work on the official android app is discontinued https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android --- "Discontinued This app is discontinued. The last release on Github and F-Droid will happen with the December 2024 Syncthing version."

What is the good solution to sync text files? I haven't found a good solution that is open source and self-hosted. Ideally, eventually, my setup should give me real time syncing the same level as multiple people editing the same file. But that is a stretch goal. I am currently using Syncthing but unfortunately it's client app has been removed from Google Play [1]. I am managing with Syncthing-Fork. [1] https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064

Correct. A big part of the issue here is that Syncthing's Android app is more of a wrapper over the desktop app than an actual native Android implementation, so a lot of the code assumes the availability of certain features (like full filesystem access, and the ability to run continuously in the background[1]) that are suboptimal to have on a modern mobile OS. Android has been pushing to restrict the usage of such features for a while. It sounds like now they finally pushed hard enough that Syncthing broke. As a longtime Syncthing user I'm personally fine with this. I think its fair for Google to demand a certain minimum bar of polish for apps on the Play Store. I'll continue to use Syncthing on F-Droid so long as its feature set continues to make it superior to those more polished alternatives. Hopefully the absence of Syncthing on the P

It's discontinued, period (https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064#i...). The fork seems to be fine currently though.

At least the Play Store version has: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064 But isn't https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid... still being kept up-to-date? I switched to f-droid at least, remember to Backup your config before uninstalling the Play Store version.

> They're Java-only APIs and since Syncthings core isn't written in Java, the author would have to write JNI glue to call Android when writing/reading files Syncthing-android is already written in Java, so shouldn't there already be JNI glue code? https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android

From the (current) final comment at https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/2064 > Nothing came of the discussions with google. Demands by Google for changes to get the permission granted were vague, which makes it both arduous to figure out how to address them and very unclear if whatever I do will actually lead to success. Then more unrelated work to stay on play came up (dev. verification, target API level), which among other influences finally made me realize I don't have the motivation or time anymore to play this game.

> In addition I learned that in Android SyncThing cannot sync to an external SD card ( https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/1366 ) . This should be fixed: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/pull/1724

It works just fine for my PC, laptop and Android. Shame that you had a bad experience with it although perhaps your use case is a bit unusual. Although that's surprising about Android being so difficult to work with in Go. It sounds like this is being resolved in Android 10 upwards: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/wiki/Frequent...

OMG I tried to setup SyncThing a couple of months ago to sync my KeePassX (kdbx) between my PC, my MAC and my Android phone. It was hell, I had to fight SyncThing every step of the way (connecting between clients, which one is the receiver and which one is the sender and whatnot), and it just didn't sync. In addition I learned that in Android SyncThing cannot sync to an external SD card ( https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/1366 ) . I ended up uploading the file to Google Drive and using it's client. It works pretty flawlessly.