As mentioned in brief on that thread, happily there’s already an established fork on F-Droid called Syncthing-Fork. The maintainer has been careful to manage expectations about ongoing development when asked but it looks like a little extra contribution is trickling in. Perhaps this one will keep ticking along.
Right, that’s a large part of the problem. The author of the now-discontinued app fought unsuccessfully since February to get Google Play to accept new updates and failed. The latest update on that issue:
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.
/r/androiddev is full of warnings ranging from kvetching to “Google wrecked my six-figure business” (with its own dimension of rightfully and wrongfully from the reader and public’s point of view).
I’ve been an Android user for 16 years. I bought into Android with the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream. I wanted to build an app, but by the time I had the time in the early 2010s, it was clear to me that Google’s runaround was impeding people. By the time I got into a place in life where I could choose “stay a salaryman” versus “start a VC-backed app,” the warning flags were all over /r/androiddev and other communities on reddit and elsewhere. It’s probably not as bad as the worst cases make it out to be, but I’ve had enough friends try app companies and complain about Google and Apple store policies making it challenging if not impossible to do business.
One case was a local tour app. Apple refused their app for nine months. I used it. It was fine. Lawyers got involved, but they basically said, If you go this route, Apple will find every little reason to reject your every update if you win and they’ll probably just ban you for life if you lose.
It’s really bad news for me. In the last week, we got passwordstore archived on github and now syncthing. There are two of major opensource apps in my workflow. To be honest, I just switched from Nextcloud to syncthing when I realized it doesn’t offer two-way sync.
I really wish it wasn’t so impossible to send data between linux and android.
The easiest thing to do is honestly using qr codes for clipboard synchronization. I’m sure there’s a dedicated program out there that works ok, but I don’t want yet another daemon service running in the background of either device, and I also don’t want to send data halfway across the world to some datacenter even though my phone and laptop are 4 feet apart (this isn’t just ideological, the ux is pretty bad when you have a bad internet connection)
python -m http.server is pretty handy, especially if you have working local DNS.
It serves the current directory recursively, with an auto generated file index.
You can pass it more command-line options, see python -m http.server -h, or in the source code since that’s linkable.
It uses WebRTC for transfer so it should be pretty fast on a local network. It uses WebPush for signaling so I don’t have to run anything. Should work on any device with a web browser.
It is set up for repeat transfers like my phone to my desktop so you pair devices then can just click to send a file. You should get a pop-up on the other device and then the transfer goes. But you can always just delete the device afterwards for a one-off transfer.
Adding an easy text-transfer feature would be nice. It could be smart and just stuff the text into the push notification if it is short enough or via WebRTC if already connected or the text is too large.
Sometimes I wish that nextcloud devs could just delete their synchronization code and copy paste the work done for syncthing, because the reliability is just so much better for syncthing in my experience it feels unfair to even compare them. Out of all the installs, self hosting and cloud service Nextcloud experiences I’ve had, I was impressed when nextcloud would manage to actually synchronize successfully at all, while no matter what device combination I’m using, I’ve not seen syncthing ever fail an already configured sync. Primary reason besides anything else I stopped using Nextcloud.
I think there’s an option to downsample, but I don’t think it’s the default. I certainly haven’t seen it change photos from Android or iOS devices. You should file a bug if you’re seeing this.
Am I right to assume that some version will stay available in the Play Store? I’m not particularly bothered with updates to it as I’m a very infrequent user of it, but would love to not re-arrange how I back up files from my phone to my Linux laptop.
If you have it installed already, it’ll keep working, but I’m guessing you won’t be able to reinstall. You can install from f-droid though, as well as use the still-maintained syncthing-fork (but in both cases do remember to backup your config if you don’t want to have to set up the sync folders again)
This app quickly drained my battery, even when I tried switching back to it last year. The F-Droid fork has always been much more performant on my phones.
As mentioned in brief on that thread, happily there’s already an established fork on F-Droid called Syncthing-Fork. The maintainer has been careful to manage expectations about ongoing development when asked but it looks like a little extra contribution is trickling in. Perhaps this one will keep ticking along.
Yes, unfortunately it does seem to be F-Droid only – not available on the Play Store.
Right, that’s a large part of the problem. The author of the now-discontinued app fought unsuccessfully since February to get Google Play to accept new updates and failed. The latest update on that issue:
It is past time people start complain about Google/Play Store, not the apps and its creators/maintainers.
/r/androiddev is full of warnings ranging from kvetching to “Google wrecked my six-figure business” (with its own dimension of rightfully and wrongfully from the reader and public’s point of view).
I’ve been an Android user for 16 years. I bought into Android with the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream. I wanted to build an app, but by the time I had the time in the early 2010s, it was clear to me that Google’s runaround was impeding people. By the time I got into a place in life where I could choose “stay a salaryman” versus “start a VC-backed app,” the warning flags were all over /r/androiddev and other communities on reddit and elsewhere. It’s probably not as bad as the worst cases make it out to be, but I’ve had enough friends try app companies and complain about Google and Apple store policies making it challenging if not impossible to do business.
One case was a local tour app. Apple refused their app for nine months. I used it. It was fine. Lawyers got involved, but they basically said, If you go this route, Apple will find every little reason to reject your every update if you win and they’ll probably just ban you for life if you lose.
I switched from the official client to Syncthing-Fork in the F-Droid app-store, and it’s working great.
It’s really bad news for me. In the last week, we got passwordstore archived on github and now syncthing. There are two of major opensource apps in my workflow. To be honest, I just switched from Nextcloud to syncthing when I realized it doesn’t offer two-way sync.
I really wish it wasn’t so impossible to send data between linux and android.
The easiest thing to do is honestly using qr codes for clipboard synchronization. I’m sure there’s a dedicated program out there that works ok, but I don’t want yet another daemon service running in the background of either device, and I also don’t want to send data halfway across the world to some datacenter even though my phone and laptop are 4 feet apart (this isn’t just ideological, the ux is pretty bad when you have a bad internet connection)
I think KDE connect is the standard for doing this sort of thing, but it would indeed be another daemon service.
What about localsend (https://localsend.org/)? Ever tried it?
I’ve been using localsend for a couple of weeks, it’s pretty slick.
python -m http.serveris pretty handy, especially if you have working local DNS.It serves the current directory recursively, with an auto generated file index.
You can pass it more command-line options, see
python -m http.server -h, or in the source code since that’s linkable.EDIT: apparently 3.14 will support dark mode on the pages.
I made a site for this https://filepush.kevincox.ca/
It uses WebRTC for transfer so it should be pretty fast on a local network. It uses WebPush for signaling so I don’t have to run anything. Should work on any device with a web browser.
It is set up for repeat transfers like my phone to my desktop so you pair devices then can just click to send a file. You should get a pop-up on the other device and then the transfer goes. But you can always just delete the device afterwards for a one-off transfer.
Adding an easy text-transfer feature would be nice. It could be smart and just stuff the text into the push notification if it is short enough or via WebRTC if already connected or the text is too large.
Surely this isn’t an underhanded method of forcing people into using Google Cloud storage. Surely.
It’s slow for large files, but I’ve found the UX of Bluetooth file transfer to otherwise be quite good on Linux.
Can any lobsters suggest a different way to keep one’s phone photos synced with a linux desktop?
Ente: https://ente.io
Immich: https://immich.app
Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com
All self-hostable.
Sometimes I wish that nextcloud devs could just delete their synchronization code and copy paste the work done for syncthing, because the reliability is just so much better for syncthing in my experience it feels unfair to even compare them. Out of all the installs, self hosting and cloud service Nextcloud experiences I’ve had, I was impressed when nextcloud would manage to actually synchronize successfully at all, while no matter what device combination I’m using, I’ve not seen syncthing ever fail an already configured sync. Primary reason besides anything else I stopped using Nextcloud.
Thank you!
I’m using Nextcloud and wanted it to be my photo backup solution but it seems to store images from iPhone in really low quality.
I think there’s an option to downsample, but I don’t think it’s the default. I certainly haven’t seen it change photos from Android or iOS devices. You should file a bug if you’re seeing this.
I’ve had a good time with Photosync (on other platforms). They claim to support Linux.
I use Syncthing from the F-Droid store, and will continue to do so. It’s fucking great, and apparently will continue to be maintained.
Am I right to assume that some version will stay available in the Play Store? I’m not particularly bothered with updates to it as I’m a very infrequent user of it, but would love to not re-arrange how I back up files from my phone to my Linux laptop.
If you have it installed already, it’ll keep working, but I’m guessing you won’t be able to reinstall. You can install from f-droid though, as well as use the still-maintained syncthing-fork (but in both cases do remember to backup your config if you don’t want to have to set up the sync folders again)
This is the only thing I use Syncthing for - syncing stuff from my phone and my tablet to/from my laptop sad trombone.
This app quickly drained my battery, even when I tried switching back to it last year. The F-Droid fork has always been much more performant on my phones.