I'll suggest giving it another shot. It really is a game changer (I can't tell what you're doing wrong, but in a few people I've seen it has been about doing a psychological switch. I wrote about it a bit here - https://mnvr.in/beginners-mind, sharing in case it helps you see how you might approach it differently)
Yes, the app does iOS background sync. Many of us (I'm part of the Ente team) are avid users and have a huge photo libraries, and day-to-day, it works seamlessly. We don't need to reopen for it to sync etc. The only time one needs special care is when doing the initial import - at that time, we sometimes need to keep the app running in the foreground for the initial sync to complete.
As the other commenters are mentioning though, this is all black magic at the mercy of Apple. The way we've evolved with our code works now, but who knows what future updates to iOS bring. One thing we've observed that it takes sometimes like say seven days for Apple's on device ML to pick up that the user really wants to use the app, and convince the OS to allow the app to run in the background to sync. But again, this is not something we've needed to worry about as _users_ - we just use it normally as we'd use Apple Photos, and it just works after the initial sync completes.
I don't understand how this can possibly work within the constraints of iOS, and I've done some digging in the code.
Anyone else find where they are doing anything iOS specific to enable background uploads when you don't ever open the app? Apple go to great lengths to make sure the user has to use the app before it allows "budget" for background processes to execute within.
My guess is that as part of the Ente team, you open the app semi regularly, which is enough for the device to give some budget for your cloud sync process to kick off in the background every now and then.
For me, I would set Ente up and forget it. But I'm 99% sure in that case it would simply stop syncing after a few days.
> Anyone else find where they are doing anything iOS specific to enable background uploads when you don't ever open the app?
Search for "SyncService.instance.sync" in the code, that's what gets triggered.
The trigger is us sending periodic silent pushes to wake up the app.
> My guess is that as part of the Ente team, you open the app semi regularly, which is enough for the device to give some budget for your cloud sync process to kick off in the background every now and then.
I know what you think, but that's really not the case :) Many our customers are on iOS, they're satisfied with it. There are areas to improve yes - the initial import is the major pain, esp because it is also the customer's first interaction with the app - but the background sync itself is works seamlessly in practice.
I know what you're saying, there is undoubtedly a complexity angle too, not all of it is malice. But after a while, one starts noticing the pattern (or maybe it is just me) that Safari has a holier-than-thou attitude towards standards. Their way of standardization is - I'll just go ahead and do something my own way, and then rest will just follow suit because I have so much market share.
Which isn't, as you say, far from Chrome's actions in theory. But in practice, the feeling I've been getting recently is that more Chrome is happy to accommodate. Safari seems to (intentionally or culturally) drag its feet a lot more in picking up stuff that has been ratified.
This is beautifully put! I hope more people are able to understand the point you're making, especially how "having a globally accepted standard for anything is a unique and historic achievement".
I guess I can make myself more clear - the good thing about CSS is not the way it does layouts, but that it can do layouts on almost any device.
You can come up with a better system that runs on your own machine (1 unit of effort), but then you have to convince everyone and their dog to adopt your new standard (1 billion units of effort).
I feel sad that you feel like that, because it really isn't! Of course, different things work for different people, and you and I just might have different ideas of fun, but for me it's the opposite. I find great joy in writing web code.
I will give it to you though - the ecosystem is complex. It takes a while to figure out what works for oneself and what is just chaff. And there is a lot of needless complexity.
Anyways, my point here is - do try to give the web another try. Maybe it'll click, and you'll start having fun writing code knowing that you can send a link to anyone and they'll be able to enjoy what you've created irrespective of what device they're on, and instantly.
OP here. Funny you mention Shoutcast, because a Shoutcast player is what I'd made earlier - https://github.com/mnvr/Soundtrack. So I sort of know what you mean :)
And you know the reason why it's macOS only? because the Apple App store reviewer rejected it heh.
I would second that. Frameworks are secondary. React + TypeScript was the key (for me at least). After that it is just learning web standards - starting with CSS, HTML, JS - and then moving on to Canvas, WebAudio etc if one desires.
