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Comment by 1over137 | Hacker News Reader

"Works on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and OpenBSD."

But notably missing: iOS.

It is for syncing files, not transferring or serving them. I don’t think it’s really possible to make an iOS app for Syncthing. It’s not like there’s a Dropbox client for iOS that does actual folder sync.

If you are looking to fully replace Dropbox, you need a server to serve files off of that you can access from the Internet. You could do this using a NAS running Syncthing for example. (There’s at least a couple different ways to get it working on a Synology NAS.) That way, you could have a CIFS or WebDAV share to actually browse from mobile devices.

It works great on Android. It's completely replaced my use of Google Photos and OneDrive (except for the rare use of sharing photos), and I keep local copies of everything. Phones these days have oodles of storage, so why not? (my phone has 256 GB internal storage, plus a microSD card slot which can more than double that).

No one seems to know about it, but there is now a 3rd party app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/m%C3%B6bius-sync/id1539203216

The developer made it with a little help from the syncthing team. There are comments there: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/mobius-sync-ios-client-now-in-...

I've been using it for some months, and it works fine, when it works. I sometimes have to start it manually because iOS killed it in the background.

Can you sync automatically photos/videos taken from the camera? That's my #1 for Syncthing on Android

I'm just trying it out and it seems not, iOS doesn't expose the photos folder to the app.

My workaround for this has been to install iCloud on a Windows machine which then downloads all the photos from my phone, and Syncthing on Windows monitors the iCloud folder and shares it with a Linux machine that does my backups. A bit convoluted but it works.

You can probably use icloudpd [1] to consolidate that on just a Linux machine, as I'm (more or less) doing now. I'm saying more or less because we ran out of iCloud space, I still don't want to delte forever old photos from iCloud but I should probably do it.

[1] https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

Thanks, looks like I've already starred this project on github, but I can't remember why I'm not using it... I think maybe the auth token expires every few weeks and you need some manual intervention to get it working again.

That's true but it can notify you when it's failing.

Unfortunately I don't think so. Apple walls off those photos very effectively. I gave up trying to sync those, and instead use an app called Copy That to get them off the phone and onto a SAMBA share on my network.

Resilio Sync does have an iOS app. And I've used it a couple times, when I needed access to my documents while on the go.

You can store "files" on iOS. Just store them on the app's private directory, then offer a launcher service or "file browser" of some sort.

And apparently these days they do offer a shared storage space, anyway.

I've never had an iOS device, but does it even have a concept of a 'file system' exposed to the user? Presumably if the app existed, you could only view the files inside the 'syncthing' app, but other apps won't be able to read its data?

How do you thinks Dropbox gets by on iOS?

iOS does in-fact have a sort-of file system. It’s heavily tied to iCloud and I don’t think it’s really meant for sync thing style files. But it’s not like drop box is much different in this regard.

If Syncthing ever supported iOS, it would likely be as a “file provider” (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider).

Please see my other comment below in this thread. But briefly, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/m%C3%B6bius-sync/id1539203216

I'm sure that with funding they'll have resources to focus on that

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