Desktop & Mobile Apps

It is already there. It is possible that you have it disabled. Go to system settings > accounts > owncloud > sync

I do have that enabled. Never worked for me. But okay, maybe Iā€™m just experiencing a bug then.

Which will stay missing for now unfortunately, see Desktop & Mobile Apps

Maybe iā€™m missing something but ios in on GPLv3.
If thats a problem there is only one solution. Start new project :wink:

Exactly, as far as I understand one would need to start a new project.

We think that making Nextcloud accessible to everyone is more important than small-scale profits. Maybe in the future we could have something like an optional donation link. In that case the money would go to the Foundation (e.g. for travel funding to get contributors to gatherings).

So yes, as @Andy said, the Android app will be free of charge ā€“ as will the iOS app as soon as we have one. But yes, there we will have to start a new project, while in the meantime any WebDAV client can be used, or even the old ownCloud app itself. :wink:


Just as an aside though, please do not misunderstand that free & open source software should always be free of charge. For it to be sustainable, people have to earn money off it, otherwise it will always just stay a hobby. The FSF actually has a great article on it at Selling Free Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possibleā€”just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

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I ANAL and absolutely no specialist in licensing stuff. But Github states there are 17 contributors to the iOS app.
If the foundation asks the permission to re-license the app under the new conditions, wouldnā€™t that be enough?

If I looked correctly there are like three large contributors to the project.

For the record: Looking at Contributors to owncloud/ios-legacy Ā· GitHub I see 4 relevant contributors which are all employed by ownCloud GmbH and itā€™s subcontractors. That would require ownCloud GmbH to relicense the iOS app.

Okay, than I understand this isnā€™t an optionā€¦ Thanks.

But please wait for swift 3. It makes no sense create a codebase of objectiveC code and swift2 will be obsolete soon.

We can implement ads and a donation function to both applications. Or maybe offer a ads free version for few cents. The important thing is, that there is a free full featured version.

The donation function would be okay imho, the ads would be against the idea of nextcloud since this means user tracking by the ad solution. And I wouldnā€™t want that. :slight_smile:

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mh yes the tracking thing is a problem. Youā€™re right, but donation will be good anyway, for Android and iOS.

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We will never ever put advertisement in any part of Nextcloud. :smiley: Even if thereā€™s no tracking, ads are the most annoying thing you can do in any app, website or even on the street.
Stealing peopleā€™s time and bombarding them with bullshit is exactly what I fight against as designer. :wink:

Optional donations from people who can spare something is the way to go. And people who can code contribute that, designers design, translators translate, documentation people document, people help each other. Thatā€™s what makes open source great, everyone can contribute.
And then there can be some companies making money off it by providing some real value like support, providing storage, etc. Not by butchering the application. :wink:

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Another topic I wanna talk about is Nextcloud App integration in our Android app. For example I used the Owncloud note app but on my phone I had to open a File in my file hirarchy instead of getting a list of my notes. Never used other Owncloud Apps so I donā€™t know how they solve the Android App integration.

I think we should invent a framework to create the possibility Nextcloud app developers could integrate their apps in our Android and iOS application as well. Maybe a Plugin architecture so we can add Plugins to our Android Application from Playstore or nextcloud store.

In perfect world people would use android library to access accounts. But app devs would also want to access other stuff like file list. I would be in favour to implement content provider which exposes multiple things. Eg ContentProvider is finished, but not merged into main repository.

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I second that approach! :thumbsup:
This would cover quite a lot of use cases.

Plus I already added a paragraph to the lib project on how to use jitpack to reference the lib from an app project and was also thinking about adding a deployment process to upload lib releases to the maven repo.

Ben wrote:

I know several people who are annoyed by the sync process of the android application. They have to sync every file manually. The main feature of an cloud application should be sync files with the cloud. maybe calendar and contacts too. Imho itā€™s not userfriendly, If that does not work automatically.

Just a note - our users actually like that the files DO NOT sync on Android - that theyā€™re just tombstones. It has to do with space availability on most of our phones. Not all of us have SD cards or 64GB phones. This should at least be an option to turn it off if the behavior changes. I understand thatā€™s not really WebDAV syncing, and that the Android client is therefore an anomaly of sorts, but the current functionality is perfect, at least for our users. I know weā€™re not the center of the universe.

I know that personally I want large files like videos to be moved from my phone to ownCloud/Nextcloud, but there are certain important, but small folders (such as particular project documents) that I wish would stay completely two way synced at all times.

Most of Android users are using SD cards, except flagship users. But yes youā€™re totally right, it should be configurable, that makes sense. :slight_smile:

And Iā€™m aware of that we are not the center of the universe, thatā€™s why I referred to other users who reported to me, that this behavior is not acceptable for them.