- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
Announcement by the creator: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-android/23002
Unfortunately I don’t have good news on the state of the android app: I am retiring it. The last release on Github and F-Droid will happen with the December 2024 Syncthing version.
Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible and no active maintenance. The app saw no significant development for a long time and without Play releases I do no longer see enough benefit and/or have enough motivation to keep up the ongoing maintenance an app requires even without doing much, if any, changes.
Thanks a lot to everyone who ever contributed to this app!
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Fyi the syncthing-fork guy (catfriend1) who’s still updating has a donating button on F-droid via Liberapay. It’s up to you if your financial situation allows you to donate, but the more of us help the remaining developers for their time, in particular those of us that rely so much on their work, the better off we’ll be. Let’s give them a little motivation to keep working on this.
FYI2 syncthing-fork (as written and confirmed in this thread) has an import button for your folders from syncthing Android.
PayPal though. Is there another way to donate to this superhero?
I tried looking around but this humble soul doesn’t have much in the way of receiving donations. I suggest contacting him via https://github.com/Catfriend1 to ask for an alternative and if he gets back to you, share it here for other people who dislike paypal.
Great idea.
I just installed syncthing-fork from f-droid and it worked flawlessly as far as I can tell:
- “Export” in syncthing
- Uninstall syncthing
- Install syncthing-fork from f-droid
- Import in syncthing-fork
Did it transfer over your folder setups so you don’t need to set it up manually?
Yes
Awesome! So happy transition is so painless.
Update: Export and import worked perfectly. Device name, device ID, and all folders I was syncing got picked up.
I feel the existence of an “export” option in a piece of software is noble in this day and age, and I’m so appreciative of it.
It says “look, I don’t WANT you to go to my competitor, but I’m not gonna try to hold your data hostage to prevent it.”
It’s class, as the Scottish would say.
Open source software doesn’t have a reason to lock you in like proprietary software does :)
More and more proprietary SaaS systems are allowing data exports now, to comply with laws like the GDPR “right to know”. Say what you want about Google and Facebook, but they were the first big companies to start allowing data to be exported before there was any law requiring it - Facebook in 2010 and Google in 2011.
I’ve said for a while that platforms that allow you to easily move make me more comfortable using them, and ironically, more likely to stay around.
Thank you for this :)
Ty! Can confirm this worked for me as well.
Yup, that was easy.
I am not the creator, funnily that is/was one of the Lemmy creators: Nutomic :)
I am a syncthing co-maintainer that kept the android app on life support since a while.Thank you for all of your hard work!
THANK you for the hard work! Your app is part of my phone photo and appdata backup.
Side question: Will you continue with a fork for f-droid?
As the statement says I wont - it will be fully discontinued. This statement applies to the official app only. It doesn’t say anything about other apps or forks - any existing once can and hopefully will continue to exist. Also all the code is free.
Sad to hear but my point still stands: Thank you very much for your work.
Any recommendation for an Android fork or any other way to make it work on mobile without an app (if that’s even possible)In that case, could the syncthing-fork app be renamed to syncthing, now that it’ll probably be the main Android app for Syncthing?
Thank you for your work!!!
funnily that is/was one of the Lemmy creators: Nutomic :)
Plot twist
I’ve installed it from F-droid but still. Fuck google. They really do need breaking up.
I heavily rely on Syncthing. Does anyone know what the outlook is for Syncthing-fork, or what the likelihood is of someone taking on maintenance of this version?
The way i understand it, this stops maintenance for Syncthing, but Syncthing-fork in fdroid will continue its development and support as usual. Both show if you do a Syncthing search in fdroid. The fork is more up to date with features.
Peachy. Sounds like there’s nothing to worry about then (from a user POV).
Good idea to send donations to the syncthing-fork devs to keep it alive though.
Yah I mean the notice for the storage access has only been five years. How can they do that.
This is sad. Google Play should never hold this much weight in the self hosted community. For Android users dedicated to open source software, F-Droid is the target.
I don’t think SyncThing users would have much issue with the app disappearing from Google. Doing away with Google is the goal.
They said somewhere that the play store thing is not the reason, it’s just one of the more recent issues.
As much as I want to use F-Droid, my work blocks all third party app stores so it’s either have access to my work stuff on one phone (via profiles) or dual wield two phones.
I lack the patience to dual wield again. It’s very annoying.
Is this your personal phone? If your work were to dictate what you are allowed to install on your personal phone, that’d be a serious overstepping of bounds.
Perhaps you can sneak in f-droid via
adb installand give it app installation permissions via ADB though.My primary phone belongs to my work. I get a stipend every two years that essentially allows me to buy any supported phone I want.
The conditions are that it’s managed by them via MDM and all my work stuff is on the work profile side.
It is a choice I make since it allows me to not carry two phones. I did that for the first two years at my company and it was annoying.
If “your” phone belongs to your employer that’s the choice you made. It isn’t yours.
I’m annoyed to see you getting down voted - I had a similar issue years ago with my work MacBook (couldn’t run a custom WM because any modification to the Finder was blocked without putting the machine into “unsafe” mode).
I love OSS, but without a verifiable way to distribute it large swaths of the workforce won’t be able to use it.
F-Droid is great, but sadly it isn’t enough.
I was today years old when I learned that you can run a custom WM on a Mac.
That’s like…the equivalent of a coca cola soda machine dispensing Pepsi.
And in terms of down votes, I don’t really care too much. It evens out overtime.
Yep, check out yabai.
Thank you but I don’t run a Mac. I used to back in the day. I just know how anal Apple is about people using their devices in any way that they don’t specifically want you to.
The problem is not “Syncthing users” it is the others that we bring along with us.
I already have F-Droid on my phone, but the dozen others that I have promoted Syncthing to over the years do not. This is going to cause a bunch of problems.
This is much more important than what you portray here.
That and the shrinking ability to grant access to device storage. If that becomes an option only on rooted phones (which seems like the directly Google is heading) it will make the audience for such an app much smaller.
If google heads that way I’ll head somewhere else.
To apple? Linux phone experience is just trash.
Realistically I have no where to go and that’s the problem. iOS is even more locked down.
This is my currently dilemma.
Each year Android becomes more restrictive like iOS with none of the benefits, Rooting becomes harder as more apps tap into the Play Integrity API (and strong Integrity is on the way to kill most workarounds for it), iPhone got a little better but is still locked down as fuck, where the hell do I go to? 😒LineageOS, maybe? Still Android, but (AFAIK) more open to change than standard Android.
I’ve been using custom ROMs for a while now, but the reality is that they can only do so much to stop Android’s ever increasing restrictions.
And the aforementioned Integrity API also detects unlocked bootloaders, meaning this will gradually become more of a problem.
And yet Resilio can access a lot more than ST, even without root.
The point you raise reminds me of when Signal dropped SMS support, after my efforts to convert all the non techie people in my life over to it. So sad when it happens…
So sad when it happens…
I don’t follow - do people still seriously use SMS? I for one try to use it as little as possible.
I was reminded of the same thing.
They’re a cloud company, their mission statement is to eradicate us. It’s like IT trying to stamp out shadow IT.
God this is sad.
The parts of tech that are useful and elegant are contracting, while subscriptions and ads just get more obnoxious.
Phones are becoming less and less interesting by the day.
Once they get to the point were all of the options that don’t require incredibly inconvenient sacrifices in functionality to maintain the interesting stuff like a video game console then that will kill interest in the market for me.
If I can’t do anything besides basic smart phone crap I might as well just buy whatever has a good camera once every half decade or so and be done with it. So whatever top end thing Samsung or Apple are putting out.
I’m not sure Google has fully thought through what it means to just be a worse version of what Apple puts out, but with more ads.
You will lose interest in the market, but will keep buying? Did I misunderstand something?
I think goes from obsession to possesion maybe, ur kinda tied to a phone for a lot of services these days and 5 years is at least more reasonable than every year or 2
You’re right, and if we think about it, companies are well aware of that, and that’s why they don’t care for offering anything beyond the basic and walled experience, because we will buy anyway.
Smartphone design is mostly a solved problem. Take today’s screens and processors and throw in a few features from the past (removable storage, IR blaster, and headphone jack) and you have a 10-year phone.
I used to get a new phone every year because phone got way better each generation.
My phone is top-tier from 2021 (Z Fold 3), and I have had zero temptation from the newer versions. All they really have is faster processing, but since all apps are designed to run well on budget phones from 5 years ago, there’s no reason to upgrade.
since all apps are designed to run well on budget phones from 5 years ago, there’s no reason to upgrade.
5 years, maybe, but any more is stretching it. And not getting system upgrades anymore is problematic. Unless you own a particular model of phone, de-Googled Android can be hard to come by.
For example, I have a 7-year old Pixel C. By the time Google stopped using system updates for it, I wasn’t wanting them as every release made the device slower and more unstable. After some effort, I was finally able to install a version of Lineage, which itself has problems including no updates in years. There’s a lot of software that is incompatible with my device, both from Aurora and FDroid.
Android isn’t Linux; Google doesn’t care about maintaining backward compatability on old devices, much less performance, and there’s no army of engineers making sure it is because there’s a served running in walled-up closet no one can find.
Google deprecates features and ABIs in Android, apps update and suddenly aren’t backwards compatible.
5 years, maybe. The entire industry is addicted to users upgrading their phones, and everyone gets a piece of that pie. There’s no actors, except perhaps app developers, who have any interest in keeping old phones running. Telecoms upgrade their wireless network - the internet connection in my 8 y/o car, and half its navigation features, died the day AT&T decided to stop supporting 3G; Phone makers make no money if you don’t buy new phones; and maintaining backwards compatibility costs Google money which they’d rather siphon off to shareholders.
Phone makers make no money if you don’t buy new phones
Maybe they should make a new phone thats desirable then. I’m still running on a phone from 2016 because there’s no modern one that wouldn’t lose me functionality that I use all the time. Anything I buy would be a downgrade.
😂I upgraded from, I think 6 year old iPhone X, to an refurbished iPhone 12 mini
(Love how it is a fast phone which can be used singlehanded)
Will use it, hopefully until we have a viable Linux alternative 😂 one can dream
I’m 100% with you. I want a Light Phone with a changeable battery and the ability to run 4 non-standard phone apps that I need to have mobile: OSMAnd, Home Assistant, Gadget Bridge, and Jami. Assuming it has a phone, calculator, calendar, notes, and address book - the bare-bones phone functions - everything else I use on my phone is literally something I can do probably more easily on my laptop, and is nothing I need to be able to do while out and about. If it did that, I would probably never upgrade; my upgrade cycle is on the order of every 4 years or so as is, but if you took off all of the other crap, I’d use my phone less and upgrade less often.
The main issue with phones like the Light Phone is that there are those apps that need to be mobile, and they often aren’t available there.
My Galaxy Note 8 is a backup phone. It was a flagship when it launched, yeah. But even so, it’s 7 years old, the last update for it was over 2.5 years ago, and it’s still chugging along like a champion.
I think Android updates intentionally made the Pixel C slower. It was a noticeable process, up to the point they stopped supporting it. I’d downgrade to an earlier version, but there’s such poor support in Lineage, I’m barely able to run the version that’s on there now.
Such a shame, because it’s still an amazingly beautiful device.
Just let me run Qubes OS on my phone already and all the problems are solved.
Yea, I want a small linux PC with touch screen, and mobile Internet 🙃 sadly, there seem none to be around with enough battery and enough computing power and a good USB C with working PD and OTG (ideally a alt mode video protocol like hdmi/DP/thunderbolt as well)
One may dream 😂😅
Literally set up a home Nas and syncthing last week.
What’s a good alternative for Android?
Syncthing-Fork (F-Droid)
Is it well supported with a long term roadmap? Or are there other software one should consider for a 12month range commitment
Not sure, but it is still active with like 80 contributors. It’s much the same as the original with a couple of extra features and more languages, so transition should be minimally painful, maybe even export - import level. I’ve been using it for years as I saw the original wasn’t very active, but they’re pretty much (essential) feature complete and stable, which is good. Apparently, google thinks that’s bad.
I can only hope the company makes the iOS client (Möbius) decides they need syncthing to continue and decide to get behind it.
As I recall, they use Syncthing as a solution in their business, this would be a big-break for them.
It says “unlimited file sync is a $5 in-app unlock” so I’m guessing they can make money. Main problem is the apple developer fees that will eat the profit of the first 25 sales each year
Maybe I’m misremembering, but I thought they used Syncthing as part of a business not directly related to Möbius - as a vendor supplying data management solutions to other companies. I suspect Möbius came out of need for their clients.
I can picture the vendor website in my head, just wish I could remember who it was for sure.
I would eagerly pay for syncthing, it’s that important to me. I keep hundreds of gigs moving around using it. It’s on my annual donate list already, but clearly that’s insufficient.
Maybe the Syncthing-Fork dev will keep it going.
iOS is already more restricted on app sandboxes, and Möbius can handle it in the paid version.
On Android, Resilio somehow has more file access than Syncthing, even without root (it can read/write to either SD card root, while Syncthing can only write to a subfolder of SD0, and can’t write anywhere of an external SD). So there’s something going on.
deleted by creator
Oh boy, just wanted to get into it. Damn sad, not of course understandable, the developers are only humans as well
The way i understand it, this stops maintenance for Syncthing, but Syncthing-fork in fdroid will continue its development and support as usual. Both show if you do a Syncthing search in fdroid. The fork is more up to date with features.
Ah thanks for the info.
I’ve always just used Folder Sync + an ssh server, if people are looking for alternatives.
That takes a lot more effort.
With Syncthing, I don’t have to setup a server, poke holes in my firewall/expose ports, etc.
Plus Foldersync is way harder on battery, I’ve experimented a lot.
And I’ve used Foldersync since at least 2010 - it’s great, really has it’s uses.
Plus Foldersync is way harder on battery, I’ve experimented a lot.
This is very configuration dependant. With an aggressive schedule checking a large number of files, it certainly can use a lot of battery; but I’ve had it setup to sync my entire device to my server a couple times a day, while also monitoring/syncing images immediately on creation/change. It doesn’t even register on androids battery usage monitor as it uses so little power.
Anyway; just listing an option for people to look at
It definitely gets better once it’s all caught up.
But it’s still much harder on battery than ST when folders have changes.
It’s kind of not Foldersync’s fault, it’s really because of the protocols - it’s all connection-based, and FS has to compare each file at sync time.
Syncthing keeps an index so it knows what files have changed. Very different tools with different use-cases and approaches.
I used FS for years until I found ST, and had to do a lot more tweaking to get sync to work the way I wanted with FS. FS doesn’t have sync conditions like ST, so I had to use Macrodroid to trigger it when on WiFi, for example.
FS can be a solution, it’s just a lot more work for anything beyond basics.
I used it on an Android DAP to sync my music collection from my NAS after giving up on Folder sync due to its issues with new file detection breaking after a daylight savings time change. Synching was definitely more reliable but it takes ages to do the scan.
Lo he estado usando en dos dispositivos para sincronizar bóvedas de Obsidian y su funcionamiento era un poco errático.
Después de los últimos problemas, lo tenía inactivo a la espera de una nueva configuración, un proceso que me parece tedioso e innecesariamente complejo. Cuando menos poco amigable.
Mientras tanto estaba usando el cable USB para volcar los archivos en el PC.
Ahora quizás tendré que buscar otro sincronizador para Android?
Android no me gusta. ¿Por qué fracasó el Linux para Tablets?Quiero mi Tablet y mi teléfono con Linux.
Igual te interesa echarle un ojo a postmarketOS. Están haciendo un sistema operativo para teléfonos forkeado directamente de Alpine Linux, en vez de AOSP
A mi me funciona a la perfección desde el primer día. Tengo un servidor donde está toda la data que quiero sincronizada, también en mi celular, laptop y PC. Honestamente funciona fenomenal. ¿Que es lo que era errático? Me causa curiosidad.
Pues en determinadas ocasiones se conectaba, en otras no. Siempre se trataba de un vuelco de archivos, que normalmente elaboraba en el dispositivo móvil y volcaba en una carpeta de ‘entrada’ para luego distribuirlos en los directorios apropiados de la bóveda de Obsidian.
La verdad es que sopechaba que no lo tenía bien configurado y por eso, la ultima vez que me falló lo dejé para tomar un tiempo en revisar la configuración.
Encuentro tambien dificultad con los nombres de dispositivos, una serie de números excesivamente larga que debería oder abreviarse con un alias: “MiTablet”, o algo sí.
Si os va tan bien a todos, es posible que está haciendo algo mal. Tenía pendiente estudiar el tema más a fondo. Ahora no sé si hacerlo. ¿El comunicado signfica que desaparece de Google Play y sigue en F-Droid? Creo que decía que dejaba de actualizarlo porque sin Gogle-Play no le resulta rentable.
En fin, quizás es el momento de buscar otra solución similar o seguir con el cable. .(Parece que es terminal para todo. La persona que le da mantenimiento solo va a hacer una última actualización en Diciembre (al menos eso dice) pero igual hay una bifurcacion del original mejor mantenida qué si esta en F-droid y en github.
La verdad es que a mi me dio mucho trabajo adaptarme a como funciona Syncthing, pero cuando al fin lo entendí, superó fácil. El tema con los ID de los folders y los dispositivos es que es mucho más seguro tenerlos así, ya que uno puede equivocarse con nombre y/o fallas al escribir, esto ayuda a reducir las posibilidades de errores.
Oh my goodness! Syncthing without Android leaves me screwed. My whole digital life revolves around it.
Oh don’t worry to much, mine too: If there wasn’t an alternative for syncthing on android, I might have kept it on lifesupport :)
What is this alternative of which you speak?
Syncthing-fork. Both show if you search for Syncthing in fdroid. Since imsodin seems to be OP Dev maintainer for Syncthing, i think he is referring to the fork.
Ooh.
Thanks.
I’ve been running the fork for a long time but somehow figured it was a soft-fork and maybe not really viable without upstream development from syncthing.
Now @imsodin@infosec.pub 's comments are making a lot more sense.
This whole thing is more or less a non-issue then?
not quite
Only one I can think of is Resilio, but it’s hard on RAM and battery for large folders.
And I don‘t know what‘s going on with them. There weren’t any updates for years, now there is a design overhaul, no new features and suddenly they want me to register. Duck
It’s been forever since I looked at resilio so this may be an unfair appraisal but… I seem to remember it’s one of those OSS projects that feels a lot more like free tier commercial software. Do you think that’s the case or nah?
Honestly just a dumb rsync client would be enough for me.
What’s the history behind this? Why could the changes be done upstream, necessitating a fork?
Sounds like the original maintainer is tired of maintaining it, and the amount of community support wasn’t enough to justify continuing to put in the effort. And then Google’s packaging process pushed it over the edge, hence retiring the project.
The fork is just another person deciding to take up maintenance of the project.
I know that part.
The other fork has existed for a long while.
Mine too!
