Why don't any of cloud storage providers have sync functionality on Mobile phones????

@Floydian i meant automatic sync and not uploading files manually.
Like i specify folders which i need synced and it reflects all the changes on google drive. I don't know when google drive started doing that?

@Floydian actually no major cloud storage providers provide sync functionality.(don't know about iCloud) Workarounds are there but such essential thing should be a norm i think.

Why should they support that? that is a truly moronic feature for mobile.
I understand why you want it, bit it does not make sense from a cpu/bandwidth/battery point of view.

@magicMirror That is not the moronic feature. In a cloud first centric world lack of this functionality is really something to think about. Google photos iCloud all sync your photos but we have more kind of important documents that needs to keep synced.
if you want to save battery just turn off the sync. No one is forcing you to use it.

ownCloud :)

iCloud syncs more than photos.

@Floydian A lot. incremental updates for "always there, always avilable, always online" is costly.
@darkLord images are synced when you are connected to power, on wifi by default. In addition, images do not change on the device. so no need to bindiff files, and do imcremental updates, or reupload the same file again and again.
I understand why you would want this feature - but It makes no sense whatsoever on mobile.

@Floydian
you are correct. Android does not support a FileMonitor API at the system level AFAIK, so any app trying to monitor for changes will have to use a presistant process, with a custom FileMonitor based on polling (bad), or to use an alarmManager and poll priodically (still bad). No other app needs to do that, with the execption of Security apps, and those are an overkill.
All other apps use the basic two modes of operation: on demand/UI app, and/or background pulling of small amount of data from the web, using push events.
Take a look at games, that need to pull gigs of data, and thier warnings when you do.
Imagine that you have an app that does the same thing as these games, in the background, all the time. Then add background polling of the filesystem, and then add uploading the changes.

tl;dr Full duplex sync of large files from mobile is very bad idea from performance point of view.

@Floydian the official JRE (oracle) has a FileMonitor API, But Android only has a stub. While I cannot give Google actual reasons, I can still speculate...
A JRE FileMonitor uses a system feature that triggers on an Inode IO event - android does not support that trigger on the system level - so this requires some work from the kernel/IO driver. Also, A FileMonitor requires a live process to work. But that is not a reason - I think the actual reason is that Google decided to use the intent system to communicate between processes, that uses the Permission system. Also, using FileMonitors has an inherent security risk - you can monitor other app files on the sdcard.

But it could be a legal reason...

@magicMirror thanks for info :) Now it makes sense why no cloud apps have such sync functionality.

I was wondering. Does Apple has such API? And if they have, are their app store policies such that no 3rd party developer can use it? 🤔

@darkLord Apple will not support such a feature, for all the reasons above. Think about thier old phones, supporting this.
I shudder to think about that....

@Floydian In theory, if you drop the "always online, always there" feature, and remove the upload feature, it will be possible to sync using power+wifi periodically, or maybe based on push events from the server.

@Floydian but how is it differnt from now?

📌

@magicMirror i just asked a similar question recently and i feel you to be a person with knowledge about this. Can you check it out?