I've long been unsatisfied with the amount of effort needed to maintain the Android port in its current state, the hacky cross-compiler toolchain needs days of wasted work to update, and is constantly out of date and breaking in one way or other. This sucks up any time I might spare to actually improve the Android port.
So, it was quite a surprise yesterday when I downloaded the git-annex standalone Linux tarball into the Termux Android shell and unpacked it, and it more or less worked!
The result, after a ?few minor fixes, works just as well as the git-annex Android app, and probably better. Even the webapp works well, and with the Termux:Boot app, it can even autostart the assistant on boot as a daemon. If you want to give it a try, see install on Android in Termux.
So, I am leaning toward deprecating the android port for this, removing 14 thousand lines of patches and android-specific code. Not going to do it just yet, but I feel a weight lifting...
Today's work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo on Patreon.
I use the current Android port on a few tablets, and it's... well, clearly labeled beta. On one of the tablets, it randomly segfaults [no idea if that's a git-annex bug or a hardware problem, not like I have a memtest86 available]. On both it sometimes just decides to add commits to remove files recently added on other machines (easy enough to fix with git revert). Sometimes it puts in place small placeholder files (git annex fsck fixes). Still far better than manually copying & sync'ing, though!
At least for me, v6 mode just doesn't work on Android — even on a new empty repository, last I checked, switching to v6 mode gave errors.
So I look forward to trying it in Termux!