Unhappy with the recently lost file upload feature in the Nextcloud app for Android? So are we. Let us explain

[alexanderdd]

Update that was shared in the blog post:

Dear users,

Good news. This morning, May 15, Google reached out to us and offered to restore the permission, which will give our users back the functionality that was lost.

We are preparing a test release first (expected tonight) and a final update with all functionality restored. If no issues occur, the update will hopefully be out early next week!

Thanks to your continued support

Sincerely, the Nextcloud team

This update was posted on May 15, 2:50 pm CET (original post below)

[adelaar]

In my eyes this all is really strange.

I did never used the Nexcloud Client for Android, not that from Play Store not that from F-Droid. Instead i allways use since many years the FolderSync-App also from Googles Play Store.

FolderSync was never in any case restricted in its functionality to upload files to the Nextcloud-Servers. Only folders that can’t be accessed by FolderSync are

• Android/data
• Android/obb

But those folders are access restricted for all apps, even File manager like Total Commander.

So its hard to understand why Google restrict Nexcloud Client but at same time not FolderSync.

[Sanook]

@adelaar

So its hard to understand why Google restrict Nexcloud Client but at same time not FolderSync.

And the Synology Drive Client too.

[mwildam]

Here is a related article: Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app • The Register
I like this sentence in particular:

n a world where words like “anti-competitive” are frequently thrown around with regard to the tech giants, Google’s action demonstrates that there are still humans in the organization capable of changing course when required.

[bb77]

@christianlupus

Adding background services work well for one or two apps. But as the number increases, the phone gets less time to sleep and battery consumption rises. So, this is more a scalability problem.

Yeah, actually my battery drained quite a bit while testing Neon and NextPush, but that might also be due to poor optimization of the apps involved. I might explore other options in the future, but they’d only be necessary if I ever decided to ditch my XMPP server for Talk anyway. For other notifications, email is good enough for me, and even that can be annoying because Nextcloud seems to think that every time someone hits ‘save’ in a text document in a shared folder, it’s worth notifying me.

I really wish there were more fine-grained control over notifications, so I could configure some to be instant and others to be grouped, say, hourly or daily.

But that’s getting a bit too far off topic now.