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Syncthing Android App Discontinued

(forum.syncthing.net)
396 points opengears | 5 comments | 20 Oct 24 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.792s | source
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_fat_santa ◴[20 Oct 24 15:55 UTC] No.41896183[source]▶
Looking at the underlying thread[1], the author mentions that it's very hard to publish on Google Play

> Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible

Can someone expand on what's going on here?

[1]: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...

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izacus ◴[20 Oct 24 16:25 UTC] No.41896453[source]▶
In this case the author doesn't want to use Storage Access Framework APIs to access the file system which were mandated a few years ago as the way to access data outside the app sandbox.

They're Java-only APIs and since Syncthings core isn't written in Java, the author would have to write JNI glue to call Android when writing/reading files (and honestly this would be quite tedious, because the way SAF works is to assign Uris to each file and you need to keep querying it to get folder structure since you can't just concat paths like with files).

The author didn't want to do that and tried to persuade Google to continue letting them access all files, all photos and all documents directly and Google said no. That was the "difficulty" - turns out it's really hard to publish on Play if you refuse to follow the guidelines. Just like on AppStore.

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pjmlp ◴[20 Oct 24 16:34 UTC] No.41896541[source]▶
Many folks keep thinking that just because Android uses the Linux kernel, it is supposed to behave like GNU/Linux.

Likewise they will be rather surprised to insist in targeting iOS/iPadOS/watchOS as if they are UNIX clones.

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bmicraft ◴[20 Oct 24 18:02 UTC] No.41897221[source]▶
Android being linux has exactly nothing to do with the fact that apps can't access resources outside their sandbox if they aren't mapped in somehow. Just like with lxc or docker containers on linux, jails on *bsd, or any other sandboxes.
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1. pjmlp ◴[20 Oct 24 18:13 UTC] No.41897312[source]▶
The only Linux thing on Android is the kernel, use anything else at your peril regarding portability between updates and OEM custom forks.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

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2. bmicraft ◴[20 Oct 24 18:31 UTC] No.41897454[source]▶
The only linux thing is always the kernel. Userspace isn't linux by definition on any* system. That might seem like a pedantic point to make, but I would like to point out that gnu utils aren't required to make a system "Linux", and whether you're using a drop-in replacement like uutils or go a more different route doesn't make it any less "Linux".

Android Apps are and mostly always have been restricted to the Java virtual machine (or its modern equivalent) exactly because that makes them portable between sometimes quite different base systems from different vendors. If you insist that makes it less of a Linux system I'd like to know what you think of flatpak apps on top of immutable distros. I hope you agree that, conceptually, they're quite close actually.

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3. pjmlp ◴[20 Oct 24 19:25 UTC] No.41897841[source]▶
It certainly makes it less Linux, as most people mean Linux kernel plus GNU userspace with glibc, or possibly muslc as alternative to glibc.

Nothing of that is expected to be supported on NDK, at least officially, Google and partners have the freedom to break those expectations as much as they feel like it.

4. ◴[21 Oct 24 01:04 UTC] No.41899820[source]▶
5. __turbobrew__ ◴[21 Oct 24 01:17 UTC] No.41899875[source]▶
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!