This was a competitive distinction against Apple's closed "safety first" platform design in iOS and led to an ecosystem of applications that took advantage of all these extra possibilities. As Google tightens its grip over the platform and pursues more aggressive limitations for security reasons (and whatever other ones), it's inevitable that many publishers and users are going to be deeply frustrated when the features that made their device theirs are no longer available.
(And incidentally, the restrictions on the Apple side have nothing to do with the application development language. I don't know where you would get that idea from or how to even make sense of it. It's just the nature of Apple's original design philosophy for iOS, where apps were deeply isolated and had no more capabilities than were necessary. Largely, Apple has been gradually adding capabilities to heavily-restricted apps over the lifetime of iOS, while Google has been moving in the opposite direction because they each started from opposite ends of the design space.)
The truth is Syncthing doesn’t have the resources to keep up with Android platform changes and Google’s review process.
Most file system API changes aren't exactly recent, they're just inconvenient. Most changes were introduced in Android 11, with some going back all the way to Android 4.4. App developers tried to use workarounds, exceptions, and special permissions to work around API restrictions as long as they could and now the holes in the sandbox are finally being closed.
The Syncthing for Android app hasn't had much development in the past few years, so years of minor changes have added up to tech debt that's (too) expensive to fix.
I feel like theyr'e doing this just to minimize storage costs or something lol. Android dev sucks for a hobbyist
It's why both App Stores are now dominated by corporatized growth chasers compromising their UX with endless feature treadmills and pushing for subscription IAP to fund it all.
Building a personal/family lifestyle business from the long tail on a few good niche apps, sold at a modest and respectful upfront cost, is pretty much a thing of the past now; and all the software we loved has been delisted or sold to those corporatized growth chasers.
4 years ago, there would have been zero friction for these use cases.
That's not true at all though, `ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE` gives app permanent access to shared directory using the file chooser dialog. It needs no extra privileges or permissions outside user choice of dir.
Android has been pushing to restrict the usage of such features for a while. It sounds like now they finally pushed hard enough that Syncthing broke.
As a longtime Syncthing user I'm personally fine with this. I think its fair for Google to demand a certain minimum bar of polish for apps on the Play Store. I'll continue to use Syncthing on F-Droid so long as its feature set continues to make it superior to those more polished alternatives. Hopefully the absence of Syncthing on the Play Store will create an opportunity for another file syncing app to fill that void, or incentivize contributors to eventually bring Syncthing up to snuff to get back on the Play Store. (Or possibly, incentivize Google to develop tools to make it easier for low-budget apps like Syncthing to meet their quality standards.)
[1]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/1048#i...
As for the mobile platforms I just don't care for it much anymore. I think Jobs was right from the get go with the iPhone: the functionality that was first announced is the most important, every else is just not very necessary. Most apps are a wrapper for a web app for some smart caching anyway. In any case the small screen size and obligatory use of fingers for input make it a slow imprecise tool for any doing stuff and I believe this is why the smartphone is such a content consumption addiction machine, there is just not much else that it does well...