Discontinuing syncthing-android
forum.syncthing.net
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 ...

Announcement by the creator: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-android/23002

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!

        • @[email protected]English
          9•2 months ago

          Perhaps the hard dependency was a mistake, but not them moving more and more code to their proprietary library. It appears that their intent is to make the client mostly a wrapper around their proprietary library, so they can still claim to have an open source GPLv3 piece of software. What good is that client if you can only use it in conjunction with that proprietary library, even if you can build it without that dependency?

          • @[email protected]English
            2•2 months ago

            mostly a wrapper around their proprietary library

            I’m not familiar with exactly what Bitwarden are doing, but Nvidia are doing something similar to what you described with their Linux GPU drivers. They launched new open-source drivers (not nouveau) for Turing (GTX 16 and RTX 20 series) and newer GPUs. What they’re actually doing is moving more and more functionality out of the drivers into the closed-source firmware, reducing the amount of code they need to open source. Maybe that’s okay? I’m not sure how I feel about it.

              • @[email protected]English
                4•2 months ago

                To be fair, the project page says this:

                The password manager SDK is not intended for public use and is not supported by Bitwarden at this stage. It is solely intended to centralize the business logic and to provide a single source of truth for the internal applications. As the SDK evolves into a more stable and feature complete state we will re-evaluate the possibility of publishing stable bindings for the public. The password manager interface is unstable and will change without warning.

                So there are two ways this can go:

                • they complete the refactor and release it as FOSS
                • they complete the refactor and change the clients to be proprietary

                I’m going to stick with them until I see what they do once they complete the refactor.

                • @[email protected]English
                  1•2 months ago

                  To be fair? Nowhere are they even suggesting they would release the SDK as FOSS, but they do say their password manager is open source. It seems like they just want a FOSS shell so they can claim it’s open source for but keep their business logic closed source.

                  • @[email protected]English
                    1•2 months ago

                    That’s the second way it could go. But given their track record of being FOSS when everyone else was proprietary and keeping the source code available, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they do. For now, “we’ll re-evaluate it again once it’s stable” tells me it’s still on the table.

      • Carighan MaconarEnglish
        6•2 months ago

        I don’t get it.

        How is that a problem to people wanting to work on or work with Bitwarden? Or am I misunderstanding the wording on it?

        It just seems to say that you cannot rip this SDK out to use it on something else. Which makes sense as far as an internal library goes, at least on the surface?

        • @[email protected]English
          1•2 months ago

          It doesn’t make sense for an internal library for an open source application, it that case it’s not open source.