Short version is - I both automatically back up a lot of data and manually export items from Android, and also use the app to grab files (i.e. PDFs or audio) that I don't necessarily want persisted.
My understanding from the parent is that if the Android ecosystem becomes toxic to Syncthing, its functionality becomes restricted, and some of the base cases I use it for won't be available.
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To answer your question, yes you can access files from your Dropbox in other applications. For example, I make a lot of video doodles for my Instagram, and the Inshot app lets you import audio and music directly into the app from Dropbox. This means I can render some audio on my computer,sync it to dropbox, make a silly video doodle on my phone, combine them and then upload to Instagram.
It's fairly seamless, something I actively use and definitely something I would want in a file-syncing tool.
> My understanding from the parent is that if the Android ecosystem becomes toxic to Syncthing, its functionality becomes restricted, and some of the base cases I use it for won't be available.
My best guess at this point is that this will hinge on whether syncthing is able to get "All files access" approval for the play store. Otherwise they'll need to basically re-write syncthing-android from scratch in Java/Kotlin, so it can integrate with the system. They've discussed doing that but frankly it's ridiculous that should even be required.
> To answer your question, yes you can access files from your Dropbox in other applications.
Based on your description, I'm pretty sure this works because you're specifically dealing with media files, as there is special support for sharing those. Does it also work if you try to share a PDF from Dropbox with a generic PDF reader app?
If I'm in the Dropbox app, I can export the PDF to say, my printer, I can open it with a reader (I have Adobe Reader installed) from the Dropbox App, or if I'm in Adobe Reader, I can open the file from Dropbox.
I haven't tried any non-Adobe readers, but my experience is that there's a pretty good interop between applications and I haven't yet really run into a pain point where I need to get something from or export something to Dropbox and needed to create or download a shim.
That sounds like you're sharing a single file at a time, which has decent OS integration. If you had a directory of PDFs that you wanted to sync with Dropbox and open with a reader on your Android, I'd wager that's impossible these days.
My understanding from the parent is that if the Android ecosystem becomes toxic to Syncthing, its functionality becomes restricted, and some of the base cases I use it for won't be available.
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To answer your question, yes you can access files from your Dropbox in other applications. For example, I make a lot of video doodles for my Instagram, and the Inshot app lets you import audio and music directly into the app from Dropbox. This means I can render some audio on my computer,sync it to dropbox, make a silly video doodle on my phone, combine them and then upload to Instagram.
It's fairly seamless, something I actively use and definitely something I would want in a file-syncing tool.