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 ...
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!
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 install and give it app installation permissions via ADB though.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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? 😒
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.
oof. All I can do is thank you for the hard work that anybody’s put into this, and I’m sad to see it go because I’ve been using this with my keypass for probably about a year now.
Really hoping the Graphene OS lawsuit allows for some Options to open up again!
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.
In all honesty, I had no idea about the fork. I really appreciate the information. Time to take it for a spin. Do you know if I can import the settings from the original one on the fork?
Oh, that’s the thing. Since the menu and settings are showing so high up, they are no accepting the touch commands. I exported from the original app, but the fork just won’t work. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. I’ll stay in the original Syncthing for now and try again once it stops getting maintained. Thanks anyways for all the info.
Oh, yeah, he did mention there’s another update for December. But it’s still an issue for many people. Moving to privacy is convoluted enough, it’s even rougher when you have to forcibly change your streamlines.
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.
Termux (on F-droid) is a userland environment that runs on top of your Android device’s kernel. It has Debian/Ubuntu-like package management system that pulls from repos maintained by the termux team. If the package is available for aarch64, its probably available in the termux repos. Its not so much of an app as it is an alternate userland that runs on top of the same kernel, but can interact with Android a couple of different ways.
The main Termux app gets you a basic command line environment with the usual tools included in a headless Linux install. From there you can select your preferred repos, do package updates, installs, etc, just like on a desktop or laptop. You could even install a desktop environment and use RDP to access it.
Then there are some companion apps that are useful:
Termux:boot is like a primitive rc.d feature that executes upon boot up any scripts found in the termux ~/.termux/boot directory. You could use the feature to launch an SSH server, or perhaps start your syncthing service when the phone starts up.
Termux:Tasker is a Tasker plugin that allows Tasker to launch scripts in .termux/tasker based on whatever triggers or profiles you define in Tasker. For example, stop or start selected services when connected to your home WiFi
Termux:API is a set of termux utilities to interact with the Android API, and do things like send messages, interact with the camera or battery, and manipulate system settings.
So you could install the syncthing package in Termux and (after setting up Termux access for your internal storage) configure it to sync folders from your phone to wherever syncthing syncs. You’d set up a start script under Termux:boot to launch it when your phone starts, or Tasker to start/stop the service on your home WiFi.
Not sure I understand the reasoning for discontinuing. Google standing in the way? Not enough f-droid users benefiting from it? It didn’t see development cause it was already feature complete?
@paperd@chaospatterns Yeah, this is the one I’m currently using. I have my pictures automatically synced to my laptop, and (in the other direction) an audiobooks directory on my laptop automatically synced to my phone.
Does anyone know why it was forked and the fork got all the improvements while the official app is in the exact same state of when it was launched years ago?
It was because all the proposals got rejected?
Because if he rejected all the improvements I don’t really understand why he’s saying “nobody wants to help development”
It’s all in the open, you can go dig around for reasons. As usual there wasn’t a single simple one. Neither was it some kind of complete fallout, we e.g. collaborated on translations and I have been in contact around various things with the one that forked.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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Any news about the fork of it? https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android-fdroid
Somene opened an issue about it, maybe answers are gonna be posted here : https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1149
We got an answer. Catfriend1 <3
https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1149#issuecomment-2427757474
Ok, so it seems everyone will migrate to it I guess ? I was already using it, maybe someone will post it here and on syncthing forum I guess.
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.If “your” phone belongs to your employer that’s the choice you made. It isn’t yours.
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.
So it’s not yours. Looks from here that’s the one issue you have to solve before everything else.
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.
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…
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.
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.
And yet Resilio can access a lot more than ST, even without root.
Isn’t that helping the average users with security in a way that a scam app can’t see much else than itself?
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.
No one says you have to upgrade your phone OS to the latest Android. You can just keep using the Android (and/or Custom ROM) that works.
Sure, but what about security? Not that I haven’t had to use outdated phones before.
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.
They said somewhere that the play store thing is not the reason, it’s just one of the more recent issues.
They’re a cloud company, their mission statement is to eradicate us. It’s like IT trying to stamp out shadow IT.
oof. All I can do is thank you for the hard work that anybody’s put into this, and I’m sad to see it go because I’ve been using this with my keypass for probably about a year now.
Really hoping the Graphene OS lawsuit allows for some Options to open up again!
Can you share what lawsuit you’re referring to? 🙏
Looks like they still haven’t launched it yet. They just mentioned they would in this Ars Technica article.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/loss-of-popular-2fa-tool-puts-security-minded-grapheneos-in-a-paradox/
This is going ro leave a shit-ton of people dead in the water.
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.
In all honesty, I had no idea about the fork. I really appreciate the information. Time to take it for a spin. Do you know if I can import the settings from the original one on the fork?
Yes you can. I just did it without any issues.
Sweet. Thanks.
Edit: It’s not working for me on GrapheneOS Android 15 Beta. Can’t start anything because of how it’s displaying.
Never used GrapheneOS. Did it export and import okay? Looks like not.
Oh, that’s the thing. Since the menu and settings are showing so high up, they are no accepting the touch commands. I exported from the original app, but the fork just won’t work. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. I’ll stay in the original Syncthing for now and try again once it stops getting maintained. Thanks anyways for all the info.
That’s a bugger! Maybe report it as an issue on their github so you can track when it’s fixed?
The app is not going to suddenly stop working, and it’s unlikely to do so before a replacement appears.
Oh, yeah, he did mention there’s another update for December. But it’s still an issue for many people. Moving to privacy is convoluted enough, it’s even rougher when you have to forcibly change your streamlines.
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.
For the F-droid enabled users, it seems there’s a Syncthing app in the Termux repos:
Holy shit. I can use apt to install packages on my phone securely?? Please tell me more
Termux (on F-droid) is a userland environment that runs on top of your Android device’s kernel. It has Debian/Ubuntu-like package management system that pulls from repos maintained by the termux team. If the package is available for aarch64, its probably available in the termux repos. Its not so much of an app as it is an alternate userland that runs on top of the same kernel, but can interact with Android a couple of different ways.
The main Termux app gets you a basic command line environment with the usual tools included in a headless Linux install. From there you can select your preferred repos, do package updates, installs, etc, just like on a desktop or laptop. You could even install a desktop environment and use RDP to access it.
Then there are some companion apps that are useful:
So you could install the syncthing package in Termux and (after setting up Termux access for your internal storage) configure it to sync folders from your phone to wherever syncthing syncs. You’d set up a start script under Termux:boot to launch it when your phone starts, or Tasker to start/stop the service on your home WiFi.
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?
Does systemd for daemons work on Android?
Also a fork that has been ongoing for years, syncthing-fork.
Not sure I understand the reasoning for discontinuing. Google standing in the way? Not enough f-droid users benefiting from it? It didn’t see development cause it was already feature complete?
As they said the app needs ongoing maintenance.
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.
There is an android native GUI for syncthing in fdroid that looks like its still maintained: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android?tab=readme-ov-file
Somene opened an issue about it, maybe answers are gonna be posted here : https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/issues/1149
@paperd @chaospatterns Yeah, this is the one I’m currently using. I have my pictures automatically synced to my laptop, and (in the other direction) an audiobooks directory on my laptop automatically synced to my phone.
Does anyone know why it was forked and the fork got all the improvements while the official app is in the exact same state of when it was launched years ago?
It was because all the proposals got rejected?
Because if he rejected all the improvements I don’t really understand why he’s saying “nobody wants to help development”
It’s all in the open, you can go dig around for reasons. As usual there wasn’t a single simple one. Neither was it some kind of complete fallout, we e.g. collaborated on translations and I have been in contact around various things with the one that forked.
@chaospatterns
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.
@jjlinux
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.
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?
Plot twist
Thank you for your work!!!
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.
God this is sad.
The parts of tech that are useful and elegant are contracting, while subscriptions and ads just get more obnoxious.
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.