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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced

Which mobile OS would that be?

The big reason I stopped being excited about cloud storage is that on mobile, from what I can tell, none of the major providers care about "folder that syncs" experience. You only get an app that lets you view remote storage. The only proper "folder that syncs" I had working on my phone so far was provided via Syncthing, but maintaining that turned out to be more effort than my tiny attention span can afford these days.

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On iOS, Dropbox integrates with the Files app. Since that was added a couple of years ago, I rarely have to open the Dropbox app itself. About the only time is when I want to restore an earlier version of a file.

You can also mark complete folders as “Make Available Offline”, which will keep their contents updated, though I don’t really use that personally.

The biggest benefit of the ios dropbox app is to search through the contents of all files. When accessing from the files app that is not possible, unfortunately.

Wow, I’m surprised. Of all my self-hosting solutions, this needs least maintenance, for me. Recently had to move to a fork of SyncTrazor, because a new project picked up support, but that’s the first time I had to think about it in years. Wish NextCloud and Immich were that easy!

I've been using Immich for some months now, it was just "install and forget" experience. Updating it to a new version also was very easy.

Obsidian is exactly this, it just totally doesn't act like it. in fact, it is a bit fiddly to make it do this. but THIS is why Obsidian is so useful

I'm using iOS and macOS. On macOS I have the folder that syncs experience (I'm using Synology Drive, but Dropbox works the same way), on iOS I have the "browse remote files" experience but I can pin files I always want to keep available which is what I want.

Right. It's similar to Windows and Android experience. Thing is, for the latter, I don't want to "pin files I always want to keep available" - I want them to actually exist as files in the shared storage, so other apps can operate on them as if on regular files.

(Unfortunately, both mobile platforms themselves are actively fighting this approach, and instead encourage apps to keep data in private databases and never expose them as actual files.)

I get the pain point, but databases are a much better data model for multi-device, intermittently-connected sync. Filesystems just aren’t designed to be async and conflict-resolving.

> databases are a much better data model for multi-device

Fyi, a filesystem is a database too.

And acid SQL databases ain't much better at that domain from my perspective.

The problem on mobile is more that the other apps don’t get access to the general file system, and/or prefer to import the files anyway.

My only major complaint with gdrive on Mac (besides Apple and Google but I have to deal with them for work) is that you can’t set the storage folder to an external location like with windows. I don’t want to be constantly loading/unloading media on my internal storage, but I don’t have a choice without janky work arounds. It’s a very frustratingly “Apple” thing to do.

Seafile seems to have that feature, but upload only.

And I haven't tried it ... unfortunately, the Android app is also ...... buggy.

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