Feature suggestions:
- Ability to import JEX on the Android version of the app.
- Toggleable automatic import & export of JEX on Android and other versions of the app.
Reasoning & use case:
It’s clear that Joplin will never officially support Google Drive and throughout the forum, laurent and others have described very good reasons why that is the case (Google’s constantly shifting APIs and TOS, high developer fees, etc.)
However, Google Drive on Android allows a user to flag a file to be available offline and to synchronize that file whenever it changes. GDrive does not have that feature for folders. The Android GDrive app cannot currently be configured to watch an entire folder for changes and make that folder available offline to other apps.
I’ve used Google Drive’s file synchronization feature with many different apps that do not officially support Google Drive, (example: Keepass). As long as the application can save its data to a single file, GDrive for Android can watch it for changes and keep it synchronized.
If Joplin could be configured to save its user data to a single file, then this would provide an option for GDrive users (and potentially users of other cloud storage systems.) The Joplin team could explicitly state that using these features with an unsupported cloud storage provider is “at your own risk.”
The first feature I propose (import of JEX files on Android) would allow users to manually import & export from a local filesystem, using Google Drive as the synchronization back-end.
The second feature I propose is a toggleable option that allows a user to specify a JEX file location on the local filesystem, similar to the way users can currently specify a local filesystem synchronization path. Then Joplin could automatically export to that JEX file location on a periodic basis, check that JEX file for changes periodically, and automatically import the JEX which changes are detected.
This might be more costly (in terms of bandwidth or storage resources) than syncing individual .md files, which is why it should be a toggleable, use-at-your-own-risk option.
I’m not personally intimately familiar with other cloud storage & sync providers that other users have requested (such as Mega), but a feature like this would allow any user to use any cloud storage & sync provider that can sync individual files. That would help Joplin stay storage-agnostic.