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!
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’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!
FolderSync is a good alternative, more battery friendly too!
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)
Thank you for your work!!!
funnily that is/was one of the Lemmy creators: Nutomic :)
Plot twist
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.
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.
They’re a cloud company, their mission statement is to eradicate us. It’s like IT trying to stamp out shadow IT.
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?
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Peachy. Sounds like there’s nothing to worry about then (from a user POV).
Yah I mean the notice for the storage access has only been five years. How can they do that.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for this :)
Ty! Can confirm this worked for me as well.
Hoping it remains viable for a long time without updates. Syncing my KeePass database is really key for me. I need to fluidly add and read passwords from at least 3 devices.
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Is webDAV not good enough for that? I use keepass via webDAV feature of the nextcloud (I know some think it is bloated) but I guess there are other lightweight webDAV solutions…
OH NO, I hope the fork will continue for a bit otherwise I’m so cooked 🥶🥶🥶
Agreed. Horrible news.
Hoping Syncthing-Fork will continue.
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.
Just got into using Syncthing for my home network, was thinking I should add it to my phone. Makes sense it dies the instant I consider it
this is your fault.
I’m a fucking albatross, I know… Or whatever that sailor’s curse bird is I forget. A crested wank.
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Oh No! This is terrible news. This IMHO is one of the most irreplaceable projects out there. I don’t know of another cross-platform local file syncing app that comes anywhere close to this. I hope that it can continue even if it’s not through the Play Store.
Google seems to be torpedoing open source developments with a number of decisions lately. Maybe they see F-Droid as a threat now that EU is making them open competition? Maybe they just don’t care.
Sad day indeed, bitwarden going shady and this.
What did bitwarden do??
I think it was made by mistake. They will more likely remove that dependency
Perhaps the hard dependency was a mistake, but not them moving more and more code to their proprietary library. It appears that their intent is to make the client mostly a wrapper around their proprietary library, so they can still claim to have an open source GPLv3 piece of software. What good is that client if you can only use it in conjunction with that proprietary library, even if you can build it without that dependency?
Instead of open core I’ll call this popular approach “open skin”.
That says that it is a bug.
It says the build error is a bug, not the inclusion of proprietary code.
To be fair, the project page says this:
The password manager SDK is not intended for public use and is not supported by Bitwarden at this stage. It is solely intended to centralize the business logic and to provide a single source of truth for the internal applications. As the SDK evolves into a more stable and feature complete state we will re-evaluate the possibility of publishing stable bindings for the public. The password manager interface is unstable and will change without warning.
So there are two ways this can go:
- they complete the refactor and release it as FOSS
- they complete the refactor and change the clients to be proprietary
I’m going to stick with them until I see what they do once they complete the refactor.
I don’t get it.
How is that a problem to people wanting to work on or work with Bitwarden? Or am I misunderstanding the wording on it?
It just seems to say that you cannot rip this SDK out to use it on something else. Which makes sense as far as an internal library goes, at least on the surface?
It doesn’t make sense for an internal library for an open source application, it that case it’s not open source.
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.
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.
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.
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 😂😅
I’m almost going full circle now, I’m buying a camera and a Music player to use as separate devices from my phone. Not only smartphones are getting expensive as hell, but the usability is actually getting worse IMHO.
And why is it so fucking awful to setup an automated pipeline to deploy smartphone apps (Android and iOS)?
For the F-droid enabled users, it seems there’s a Syncthing app in the Termux repos:
~ $ apt show syncthing Package: syncthing Version: 1.28.0 Maintainer: @termux Installed-Size: 26.4 MB Homepage: https://syncthing.net/ Download-Size: 7857 kB APT-Sources: https://packages.termux.dev/apt/termux-main stable/main aarch64 Packages Description: Decentralized file synchronizationdeleted by creator
Yeah, seems like this is what some people are using. They said you can use Tasker to run it in the background.
So is this the same as installing on the desktop? Run the service and then http to home to configure?
I’ve been using Syncthing-Fork (on F-Droid) for the extra features it has. I wonder if that developer will be able to continue.
Somene asked in an issue about this subject, maybe answers are gonna be posted here : https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1149
I just installed that on your recommendation.
Hoping for the best.
Here the link for anyone who wants to check it out.
Literally set up a home Nas and syncthing last week.
What’s a good alternative for Android?
