Lemmy maintainer
What a shame, I spent a lot of time working on syncthing-android (probably around four years). But in the end I stopped for the same reason, it’s very demotivating to be so reliant on a corporation like Google which is entirely indifferent or even hostile to open source apps. Every year with the new Android version there are new required features or mandatory changes to implement, and if you don’t comply they don’t allow publishing new app versions. That’s not a big deal for commercial apps with fulltime developers, but it’s a lot of work for small apps maintained by volunteers. And it’s never anything that would benefit syncthing-android or it’s users, just busywork that takes away from bug fixes and feature development.
The good thing about open source is that someone else can always pickup and continue the work. Google’s shenanigans were what drove me to server administration and backend development, which finally led me to work on Lemmy. The experience with syncthing-android definitely taught me a lot about how to run a popular open source project.
In principle it’s finished, but last time we put it on lemmy.ml for testing there were performance problems and we had to revert. So far it’s not clear what caused those problems, so we need to try again somehow.
With pleasure :)