PSA syncthing-fork has changed owners

This whole situation has been bizarre and really poorly communicated.

I wouldn’t say it’s only for the extra paranoid, but rather for everyone.

After reading the whole discussion, it’s clear that the repo transfer was handled in an extremely unorthodox way, at least by usual standards for repo handovers that I'm familiar/experienced with.

Communication from Catfriend1 was absolutely nonexistent, and there was only minimal info from the person who took over using a GitHub account created just two days ago.

Trust is something that must be earned, not given to someone you’ve never seen or heard of before.

Not sure if I qualify as extra paranoid but this whole situation feels very sketchy and has me reconsidering my use of syncthing. Making significant changes like this without any explanation is extremely bad practice.

Absolutely not trusting this. Uninstalling until we know more, and ideally just getting a different solution entirely. A new account tried to impersonate Catfriend1 directly at first, and then they switched to researchxxl when someone called it out (both are new accounts). Meanwhile the original Catfriend1 has provided no information about this, and we only have the new person's word as to what's going on. There's way too many red flags here.

Update from Simon aka imsodin, Syncthing Maintainer

tl;dr for android users: No need to switch apps at this time, the current install continues to work and is safe. If you can disable app auto-updates, please do that for now to be on the safe side.

Good news: Had a good chat with @nel0x. He is a collaborator on researchxxl’s repo and just marked those releases as “pre-release”, which prevents the obtainium auto-upgrades. So we are back to no immediate risk for users and we can take it slowly, trying to establish communication and more context. It’s still possible and imo likely that nothing nefarious is going on, just a very suboptimal handover that needs clearing up. There’s no need to go dig for repos on github, the technicalities of continuing to publish an app are not an issue - the open/relevant points are about a possible direct continuation of the existing app (or not), the time/effort that needs to be volunteered to publish an app and the trust in whoever does that. Hopefully we can work something out. If you are interested in helping maintain the app, let us know, other than that imo nothing to do here except if you are a user, to do the above in the tl;dr and every now and then check-in on the status (now and then being more like every week than every hour 😉 ).

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661/58

Maybe it's actually true that catfriend1 knows the new owner in real life but... this is not a calculator app, this is something that has complete access to the phone storage... handing the keys without any communication is concerning...

And the issues are locked so if something nefarious happens, discussion will only occur somewhere else instead of the repo

this entire thing has made me really rethink whether I want to swap to the new repo or not.

Why was there no communication about it. The gplay repo maintainer wasn't informed of anything, no public notice to anyone was given, just a transfer of the repo and a status issue here explaining it.

Obviously the act is genuine as they were able to keep the original keys but like, this entire system seemed really sketchy.

I'm also not happy with the fact that it seems the first thing they added was removing checksums, but that might be a temp thing.

I also just noticed that it looks like they removed the entire public key for it, which if they had the original private keys using the existing public keys shouldn't be an issue right?

The new repo has two releases in it now. These releases are not signed with the original key as far as I can tell. Further, GitHub is silently redirecting to the new repo, even in Obtainium, meaning it's possible that if you had this previously installed via Obtainium and updated now, you may have unsigned apks installed that may or may not contain the changes in the repo.

This is a mess. I deleted the repo from Obtainium (luckily I don't auto install updates) and will wait to see what happens over the next few months. Might just save my notes in a network share instead of using syncthing from my phone. Idk, notes are all that I was using it for.

My policy with open source projects like these is to fork the repo and only bring in upstream updates when I'm certain it's safe and necessary

Thank you for the notice. This is a really bad look on the project. Thankfully I still have a version from before the takeover installed and disabled auto-updates just in case. Though I suspect f-droid will not accept builds by this person until trust has been established.

What's the last "safe" version on F-Droid? 2.0.11.2?

Thank you!

What's wrong with original Syncthing? Why would anyone use a fork?

I had intended to try it out, but now uninstalled for... just in case.

Some kind guru please watch the source for unwanted effects.

I installed mine from F-Droid. I just went there to turn off updates and it doesn't exist. I have not been paying attention so it may have been gone for ages and not related?

For some reason, my version of syncthing-fork is old and source is not even on f-droid anymore. Was there any other before catfriend1? Perhaps I downloaded APK from GitHub... Can't recall.

dammit I like Syncthing. does kdeconnect do a decent job at syncing files?