SyncTrain for Syncthing on iOS

A few years ago I gave Mobius Sync a try as a Syncthing client on my iPhone and iPad. That went about as well as you’d expect for an iOS adaptation of something that wants to be an always-on filesystem-watching daemon. It wasn’t really worth the stress of wondering what quantum state of sync everything is in, and I hated having to explicitly open it up to nudge it to sync.

It’s even more annoying now that I’ve got an Android-based DAP, and the Syncthing client I’ve got running on that to keep my music files in sync comes with options like “don’t do this over cellular connections,” “don’t do this when you’re not connected to power,” and a few other things that let you just sort of manage for yourself and accept the potential tradeoffs.

Today I came across SyncTrain, which is going to have a lot of the same problems anything that should be running in the background all the time(ish) on iOS is going to have, but includes a nice workaround: You can make an Apple Shortcut to give it a nudge to sync for 10 seconds if it fell asleep on the job. That’s enough to check in with other nodes and pull in changed stuff. Since everything is on Tailscale, it ought to work wherever I have connectivity.

I’m going to try it out to manage my org-mode todo lists and inbox via Plain Org, which can read files off the device storage.

I’ve tried a few other things:

SMB shares on my NAS via Files.app. That has worked somewhat well, but there are occasional permissions freakouts.

sftp shares via Blink Term via Files. Also permissions freakouts.

iCloud, which is sort of mysterious (and not available to my Linux machines)

Besides letting you nudge it, the UI for Synctrain is pretty nice. It’s clean and native-looking. If you thought Mobius was all there was, SyncTrain is worth a look.