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Syncthing Android App Discontinued

(forum.syncthing.net)
397 points opengears | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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treyd ◴[20 Oct 24 16:37 UTC] No.41896556[source]▶
To be fair, it's really messy to do Go on Android calling back into Java because of how its runtime works. I'm not surprised they don't want to do it if it's a hobby project and it'd require making substantial changes to Syncthing's core logic.
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izacus ◴[20 Oct 24 16:38 UTC] No.41896573[source]▶
It is - the way I always structured our architecture in this case was to write as much as possible of file handling in Java side and keep JNI surface minimal (it's also better for performance).

But that's really hard to do if you didn't begin with cross platform architecture that doesn't take into account having to modularize the filesystem layer for Android/iOS :/

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beeboobaa3 ◴[20 Oct 24 18:17 UTC] No.41897349[source]▶
Since you have such strong opinions on the matter, and experience, why don't you contribute to the SyncThing android app and implement this? Alternatively you could grab your time machine, travel back several years and let them know to anticipate this arbitrary change google would pull in the future.
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1. izacus ◴[21 Oct 24 12:51 UTC] No.41903615{5}[source]▶
I professionally contribute (and have contributed) to many projects to make them compatible with Play Store policies (that's my job after all), but I have limited time and generally the attitude of SyncThing developer kinda annoys me since it's an attitude of that developer in your PR that will spend weeks of time arguing over code implementation instead of fixing the comments in a day.