today i have been through three different "cloud replacement" apps for android. none of them are remotely functional.
each of them grinds my android phone to a halt. none of them support even the most basic functionality i would expect from a cloud replacement app.
the most basic thing i need is that when i take a picture it gets uploaded, but this naturally, obviously, clearly begins with the step of synchronizing my existing pictures to the server. this doesn't work.
First I tried Ne xt cloud and after getting it set up (surprisingly easy tbh) I found that there is no method to select a whole folder to sync, the automatic photo sync only works for newly-taken pictures, and if you select more than a few dozen files for upload it breaks.
Then I tried Pyd io which was so broken and shitty I couldn't even get the client to connect. The instructions were incomplete but I'm savvy, it just refuses to fucking operate and has no logs. I shitcanned it.
I then tried Se afile which took twice as long as the others to get working because it's even less documented and the documentation is wrong. it shit 9 folders into my homedir without asking and i didn't figure this out for hours.
there are multiple conflicting statements in what little documentation there is about running on different ports. I didn't want to run on the default ports because of how heavily fucking scanned 8000 and 8082, for FUCK'S sake, are.
so after burning two hours trying to get it to run on different ports and finally realizing that that just *isn't an option* i chose to just open myself up to vulnerability just to find out *what the fucking program does*, and found that it's useless garbage too
after the third try I got the camera sync to actually start uploading my files! it is the only one of these apps that could actually try to upload all 3000 of my photos. except it puts them all in one fucking directory.
neither the app nor the web interface offer the ability to narrow down by date so, again, this is useless to me.
like yes I can sort but this is not the fucking product that needs to be delivered for this application. it's a photo sync tool. it needs to divide shit into months and days the exact way the OS photos app does. this is not hard.
While I appreciate very much the people who tried to help me by turning me on to these applications, they are just more open source abandonware that meets checklist features but does not decrease effort expended to achieve a goal.
A tool decreases effort expended to achieve a goal. If it can't do this, it's not a tool.
If I had turned on google cloud backup I would probably be done by now, and google would have some JPEGs of my credit card and tax documents and then a year later some French hackers would have those as well.
This is it. This is how it all ends. The only reason a functioning piece of software gets written in the 2010s is because it will funnel data to a data broker. All other programs don't work.
Nobody finishes anything. Nothing is funded. It's all means to a fucking end. Even pro Dr opbox is not even remotely the program I want but it's the only thing that "works", for values of "works" meaning you fit YOUR life into THEIR schedule and budget and ideals.
And again, to be clear, I don't want to do any of this. I don't even want this functionality. I would be okay with plugging my phone into my PC /if that fucking even worked but it does not work/
75% of the time I plug my phone into my PC, my PC just doesn't recognize there is a phone plugged in. This has happened across OSes, phones and PCs.
MTP is absolutely useless. It can move maybe a dozen pictures before the connection shits the bed and then the PC wont' recognize the phone for half an hour.
Because of my history I would almost be willing to humiliate myself by stooping to bullshit like running an FTP server on my phone and moving the files over, except that even that invariably doesn't work.
That results in bullshit like, oops, the FTP server crashes after every 9 transfers because. Because. Because it does. Because. Because this thing that worked in 2003, 1998, 1993, 1987 doesn't work anymore. Because. Because it just doesn't.
High level doesn't work. Low level doesn't work. Nothing works. The most basic fucking functionality doesn't work.
It works in tiny bits and pieces, fits and starts, for moments at a time, long enough that you can get by. just long enough. But if you actually need it to be reliable, it just means your day is over. You don't get to do what you wanted to do.
