Hi i am a recently new user of nextcloud and i just installed the app on my ios device. all was going well until i wanted to upload all my photo’s. once i turned on upload my cameraroll all my foto’s started uploading until i closed the app or turned the device off. I looked this upand it turned out this was removed on purpose. This defeats the whole purpose off a cloud and is super user unfriendly. It turned out this is removed because it used gps and people are afraid off tracking. i understand that you wan’t to make averyone feel safe using your platform but removing the feature makes no sense. why not bring it back and leaving it off by default. sorry for my english i am not a native english speaker.
I think IOS deliberately not giving access to this feature to Nextcloud developers I think there is no workaround until in Apple managers realize that they are simple ass holes.
I guess this is more complicated than this. I don’t think Apple allows any significant background tasks to be run by any third party apps as allowing this will drain battery quickly it means the customers would be unhappy and complains how bad this devices become.
I guess Apple keeps access to background tasks for it’s own apps/services that they can control and make sure it would be used in responsible manner.
Additional advantage (for them) is that it means that if you like seamless experience on Apple devices you need to use/buy/subscribe Apple services ie: iCloud, Apple Music etc.
Can it be done in a better way? I guess so.
I can imagine that it can be resolved in a sort off smart way to avoid draining battery and allow semi-background activites to third party apps for example in following way:
iOS when connected to external power source and battery level above some fixed minimum level would wake up registered thirdparty apps and say “OK guys, we are charging now so feel free to do your background tasks until the external power source will be disconnected”.
Perfect moment for Nextcloud to sync files then.
Would Apple implement that or similar solution?
We may hope but they most probably would not see benefits in spending on such features over things form their own agenda…
In my experience Nextcloud iOS app works not worse than others in this department. With maybe exception of Resilo (not and FOSS) which was clever enough to not let iOS to sleep until all the files were uploaded.
I’d welcome such feature in NC app!
Meanwhile I had to turn off automatick locking in iOS settings if I need to sync more stuff and that find amusing sitting next to iPhone to not allow it to sleep…