Hey folks! I know a while back there was a kerfuffle because syncthing-fork for Android went dark, and then a new person showed up and claimed everything was cool and they’d been privately given the keys or something, and people were concerned. I pinned my fdroid version to the at-that-time-current release until we got clarity.
Well, it’s been a while and I just noticed I’m still on that old release. So… how’d it turn out? Do we like the new person yet? Is there a promising fork y’all are using? Or is the project dead? I’m sure I could just go look at the repo, but I’m also sure the repo would tell me “yeah, we’re all cool” no matter what, so I’m curious what the community feelings are. Have there even been any useful new releases since then?
Thanks!
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F-droid themselves gave an update in April:
https://f-droid.org/en/2026/04/03/twif.html
If you’ve been holding off updating Syncthing-Fork we have two pieces of news for you. First, the original dev continues to collaborate still, we know this was a pain point back then. Second, we’ve just added BasicSync, A simple app for running Syncthing, which just controls Syncthing’s running behaviour as hands off as possible, while the original service hums in the background.
So it seems since the handover things have settled but there is also a new fork which takes a more bare-bones approach.
This is amazing. So what you’re saying is that the answer is that there are now three separate syncthing apps, which are all similarly functional and in collaboration with each other?
Two built for Android, Syncthing-fork and BasicSync, and the latter is meant to be less featured and simpler (or basic! Wow, it’s in the name!)
And the third is the desktop service for Linux, Windows, etc. Technically, you can install the Linux one with Termux or similar on Android, but it’s a little jankey. It is possible though, as somebody else has already mentioned!
I use Localsend, to me it feels like what Syncthing wishes it was on some level, Localsend is limited to only sending messages to devices using the same network, however, on pure simplicity, Localsend is the goat. Maybe I’m just too stupid for Syncthing, I watched the tutorial and all, it just seemed way to overcomplicated to me on certain aspects, even when it worked it felt like I did something wrong, it was never as simple as “pick file, send file”. Localsend is my go-to nowadays and does all i needed from Syncthing 10x as fast and with a much better UI.
Localsend doesn’t automatically sync files between devices does it? Afaik you can only send files as a manual thing you have to do for every file. They’re intended for different things.
