A little while ago I released Synctrain, an open-source Synchting app for iOS with native UI in SwiftUI:
As it turns out, it is very easy to also build a native macOS version from this. With some tweaking it is now a half decent app that can actually be used:
The current offering for macOS works really well, but is little more than a wrapper around the Syncthing binary providing a menu bar item with minimal UI, support for configuring start-on-login, auto-updates, deferring to the web UI for everything else. My app provides access to a subset of Syncthing’s features (although modifying the underlying config.xml is still possible), but adds a file-centered UI and support for selective synchronization and on-demand streaming of files. This is similar to the difference between MobiusSync and Synctrain on iOS. The macOS app has all the features the iOS app has, except for everything related to background synchronization (not needed on macOS) and scanning QR codes. It adds the ability to select custom folder paths (on iOS the app currently is only able to sync folders inside the app’s container).
The code for this is available in the GitHub repository. It should be fairly easy to build the app yourselves from there if you have XCode installed. For those who just want to try the app, download a notarized .app file here. (Note, no guarantees whatsoever. Do not complain if it eats your files or worse).
It is not as polished as the iOS edition yet, but I wanted to share this here now to see if there is any interest at all in this. Depending on the response I will decide whether it is worth to spend the effort also publishing this in i.e. the Mac App Store (and going through App Review etc.). Looking forward to your thoughts!
I would like to thank you for your development and time. Your IOS/IPAD app are really great and having an app on the App store is great as well, particularly for the sandboxing capabilities.
Unless I’m mistaken, this sandbox could be achieved outside the App store as well? If that’s the case, for the freedom to choose to install the app outside the Apple identifiable store could be great in addition as well maybe directly via your github release page? (and why not on Altstore for Ios/Ipad in the future?
However, for the moment I’m not able to test your app on MacOS as the target is MacOS 15. Would it be a possible to lower down this requirements to older versions, at least those still officially supported by Apple (by supported I mean security updates and maybe some bug fixes), macOS 13 (Ventura) is the oldest still supported.
Thanks for your reply,
EDIT: I saw your comments on the IOS thread about older version so that’s noted
The app is freely available on the App Store on both iOS and macOS, so I don’t see what value distribution outside it would bring users (except for users in regions where the app is currently unavailable, but working on it. For macOS I can provide Developer ID notarized binaries. Those indeed do have sandboxing by the way).
As for supporting older macOS: the user base for that is very small so I’m even less inclined to support older macOS versions than supporting older iOS Additionally from my experience macOS is always a bit more fiddly than iOS due to the fact that it is simply an older and more complex environment. Luckily it is fairly easy to build the app yourself there (possible even without Developer account I think). So I would suggest to try and see if it builds on an older versions. I might give it a try when I have the time to see what the issues are but don’t expect too much from this.
Been looking for exactly this. THANK YOU. Please definitely keep working towards officially publishing this. The lack of a clean GUI and selective sync has frustrated me and this is wonderful.
Could you please enable the feature to enable the syncing of iphone photo library as in the mobius sync app. Thanks and also the app is not available in the australia region and am using the test flight app in ios…is there any plan to release it in the Australia region and if so any eta….thanks so much for ur work
Mobius Sync implements a sort of ‘virtual file system’ to allow one-way sync of photos directly from the photo library. I would like to add this to Synctrain but unfortunately (1) vanilla Syncthing doesn’t (yet) offer a way to do this without having to maintain a separate fork, and (2) the Mobius implementation is not open sourced, so this requires quite some development work. Certainly not a matter of just ‘enabling’ it!
Will have to check the legal situation for Australia regarding crypto import. Depending on the outcome I can make the app available. I am not a lawyer nor do I particularly like to investigate these things, so this is very low on my list.
