Comment by lukeschlather
7 months ago
In a perfect world, what Syncthing does would be handled at the OS level and all OSes would seamlessly interoperate. In the real world the OS vendors are hostile to interoperability so the only way to get that is with a third-party tool that has OS-level access.
There are Android APIs to let syncthing integrate as cloud provider itself and the author didn't use those either.
In reality, Syncthing is also pretty good at destroying battery life unless you go above and beyond to configure it in a way that then hampers Syncthing's ability to provide seamless file continuity between devices. I know that there will be disagreement here, but in my own opinion OS vendors are correct in being hostile to these apps under current circumstances. They could provide better ways to have third parties implement it and provide cross platform support for their platform solutions, but I've had Syncthing be the #1 cause of battery life drain on multiple devices and platforms before and it's honestly just not worth fighting with it. To get it under control relegates it to being not much better than rsync.
I think it's important to draw a distinction between OS providers and app store providers here. The fact that they're the same entity in most cases is or should be largely irrelevant.
OS vendors shouldn't make it impossible to create apps that have unlimited access to the filesystem or that suck battery in the background. There are reasons users might want to run apps that do either or both - a file indexer, for example. All the OS should do is ask the user if the app has permission to do those things.
An app store provider on the other hand might reasonably have many criteria for inclusion, such as F-Droid only allowing FOSS. This only becomes problematic when the app store in question is effectively a monopoly.