Multiple Android devices known issue

Like many other new posters, I’m looking for an alternative to BT Sync between multiple desktop and Android devices. Since it took a while to diagnose and find the relevant tracker issue, I thought I’d make a forum post to point others in the right direction. Hopefully this will save others some time if (like me) they search the forums and find nothing relevant.

If you use multiple Android devices there appears to be a known issue (currently reported as an enhancement request) that causes frequent syncs as the Android devices fight over file modification times: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/831

This issue only appears when the second device is added to the sync process, and causes noticeably increased CPU and battery usage across all devices. As I understand it, at present your only option is to only sync to one Android device till this issue is resolved.

Overall I’m impressed with Syncthing, I just wanted to call this out for other BT refugees since it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the forum, and the issue title isn’t obviously relevant. If I’ve misunderstood the current state of multiple Android device support please correct me.

This is correct. Added to the FAQ.

*edit: the hyperlink button in discourse seems to break the #

Link you gave doesn’t work because the # got converted to %23 somewhere. Needs to be FAQ (or at least this worked in the preview before posting…)

Maybe the entry in the FAQ could be extended? Something along the lines of (which is reported also in https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/831)

“You can sync multiple android devices without trouble if you place all your files under directories under /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid AND this is not on an external SD card. See the above github issue for details and discussion.”

Feel free to add it :wink:

Done (I didn’t know it was so easy :slight_smile: )

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From what v6ak wrote, Android/data/com.nutomic.syncthingandroid should work on any sd card device (internal or external).

Do you have different experience with this? (my n5 doesn’t have external sd card).

Ooops, sorry, no I don’t any experience to the contrary (I have no devices with external SD card) and I guess I had misunderstood the status. I just removed the comment about the external sd from the FAQ.