• ultranaut@lemmy.worldEnglish
    59·
    1 day ago

    Not sure if I qualify as extra paranoid but this whole situation feels very sketchy and has me reconsidering my use of syncthing. Making significant changes like this without any explanation is extremely bad practice.

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      70·
      1 day ago

      has me reconsidering my use of syncthing

      This is about a third party piece of software that isnt directly related to syncthing. The devs of syncthing have however been recommending syncthing-fork as their choice for android, so it definitely needs clearing up.

      • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
        37·
        23 hours ago

        We’re sort of in this situation because the official project decided not to continue providing an official Android app, yet people want to use it on Android forcing unofficial versions to be created and maintained.

        I get that they don’t want to deal with Google Play anymore, but somebody has to deal with it and them not owning the app is putting users at risk.

        • hersh@literature.cafeEnglish
          21·
          23 hours ago

          I get that they don’t want to deal with Google Play

          Was that the reason? Shame they didn’t just leave it on F-Droid and GitHub then. Nobody needs to use Google Play (at least not yet…)

          • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
            24·
            23 hours ago

            https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-android/23002

            According to this post, it was partly that and lack of maintainers. Given there’s maintainers for a fork, I’m curious why they didn’t bring them into the main project.

            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.

      • ultranaut@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        19 hours ago

        Yes, I only use it via syncthing-fork so this is a distinction without a difference to me.

    • tychosmoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      23 hours ago

      Same here. It was already a little bit concerning that I was relying on a smaller fork to get syncthing on Android. It was on my to do list to figure out options. Now it’s at the top of the list, and I’m not doing updates for the time being on Android. That’s almost the entirety of my reliance on syncthing - phone to PC sync. I don’t really need it that much for sync between PCs.

      • midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        11 hours ago

        I said this in another thread, but apparently it’s not widely known: syncthing works fine on termux, there is no need to install any third party code. You do need to run termux-setup-storage to get access to the shared storage that other apps can access, and I found it worth it to set up the termux:boot app to run syncthing on phone boot. This way only uses the official syncthing repo.

        • tychosmoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I have heard that. Can it be given run conditions, like only on wifi, and respecting the Android battery saving setting?

          My phone has an always on split tunnel VPN to home, so the other sync devices are always accessible. Without the Syncthing-Fork run conditions it chews through mobile data and battery.

          • midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            20 minutes ago

            You’ll have to brew your own run conditions I think. For me, it’s not a big deal, just a bunch of documents and pictures and not much gets added every day. But termux does have access to network state, and I’m pretty sure syncthing accepts stop and continue execution signals, so a shell script shouldn’t be too difficult. Another possible option is to use termux:tasker.