this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
4 points (83.3% liked)

iOS

1942 readers
1 users here now

The home for all things iOS on LW.

Rules:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

For Android I've used SyncThing for ages. Any way to break out of the Apple ecosystem for photo syncing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Server-side, depends on how you choose to set it up. There's a dozen different ways to setup the Nextcloud server. I used Nextcloud-AIO. In the last 2 years, I've had 3 issues take down the server, two of which were hardware related. Automatic backups, Automatic updates. App gives notifications when both happen.

Once the server and apps are setup though, it's largely set and forget on server-side, desktop (Linux, Mac and Windows) and on Android. iOS is a little more hands on.

iOS has a thing where it will kill apps running in the background if you haven't opened them in a while in a bid to save battery. Used to be a major headache with VPNs. As long as you open the app every few days it will generally just do it's thing in the background. It doesn't seem to be as aggressive as it use to be, but I also use the Nextcloud app to scan documents (The app has a document to PDF scanner) into Paperless via a SMB share so I'm opening the app two or three times a week anyways. You can create an automation in Shortcuts to open the app automatically, though that does require the device to be unlocked for the automation to run.

[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Server setup is no problem as I would host it for them. If I understand you correctly I would need to tell them to open the app every so often for the sync to work. Hm, not exactly an ideal solution, but I guess it's an acceptable compromise.
I assume this is a hard limit iOS-wise, so all third-party syncing apps will have to deal with this somehow? There probably isn't a way to selfhost an iCloud server somehow, is there?

so all third-party syncing apps will have to deal with this somehow?

My understanding is that the process killing applies to everything that is not directly tied to the Apple ecosystem, so probably. So far I haven't found a way around it.

There probably isn’t a way to selfhost an iCloud server somehow, is there?

That would be nice, but this IS Apple we are talking about here. As far as I know that isn't even an option for the US Government.