How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.
Offline support is alright, though I haven't worried about this much. I think it doesn't do any local deletion, so whatever stays in your DCIM folder is still on device.
Do you have to ever open the app though? On iOS/Android?
In my case I would need it to run on the phones of my family members, and they probably will never open the app.
I decided to try Nextcloud exactly because of this. My problem with it is more that the whole thing is a bit unreliable. Like once in a while the app will get into a state where the only way I found to recover is to just erase everything and re-sync everything. And the app will resend ALL the pictures, even though they are already on the server.
And I can't do that with my family members' phones. It doesn't matter to me if the app takes a month to sync the photos, but it has to require zero maintenance. I can deal with the server side, but I need it to "just work" on the smartphones.
Searching for "nextcloud ios background sync" shows a whole bunch of forum posts and bug reports about it not working well unless you have the application open.
One issue (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2225) been open since 2022, seems to still be not working properly. Another (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2497) been open since 2023.
For something that works well it seems like a ton of people have a lot of issues with it. Are you sure you're on the latest iOS version? Seems like people experience the issues when they're on a later version.
Android is more relaxed but the vendors (like Samsung etc) will go around that and implement their own aggressive background killing bots. Sometimes, this causes alarm apps to stop and not wake you up etc.
The main reason is battery life. Tragically, this makes sense due to the cesspool of spam apps that plague their ”curated” app stores. If you’re an app developer who want to use it responsibly you’re in for a world of trouble. I know because I am one of them (well, I consider myself responsible at least).