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.

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

                  Stable bindings doesn’t mean open source, so I don’t see how that tells you it’s still on the table

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

                    They’re moving a lot of code to this internal core, which means this core is unstable. It’s pretty common for projects to hold off on making code public until it’s reached a certain level of stability. I’m guessing they’re not interested in accepting patches, due to the high level of churn from the dev team. Once that churn dies down, there’s a chance they’ll reconsider and make it FOSS.

                    I’ve seen this in a number of FOSS projects, and it’s also what I do on my own (I don’t want help until I’m happy with the base functionality).

                    So that’s why I hold out hope. We’ll see once the churn on that internal SDK repo dies down.