I know you’ve provided reasons why DT prefers to have third party sync but how come Cultured Code’s Things has its own sync. Could not DT do something similar- Things is seamless. I copy this to my ios Things and know it’ll be on my desktop things or vice versa without, apart from initial east setup, any effort on my par t. I feel sure DT users would pay a bit more if cost were the issue?
Another viewpoint to this is to ask why doesn’t Things sync like DEVONthink? There’s no way to attach documents to tasks in Things, which a lot of users continue to ask for. There is an enormous difference between what it would take, in terms of complexity and server resources, to sync the data the collective DT user base creates and what the Things user base creates.
@Greg_Jones is spot on here. Not only is his advice about the complexity that would be required to support massive amounts of data from thousands of users, but remember that sync in one app is not necessarily sync in another app.
Syncing a simple single file - like an ICS file - is very different than syncing chunked, raw, encrypted data and the transactional data required for “keeping the books in order”. Without this mechanism, syncs would take a lot longer, be more prone to corruption in transit, and the likelihood of creating inconsistencies in the synced databases would be almost guaranteed.
@cgrunenberg has gone to great lengths to make our engine function in a robust, reliable way, with speeds being a good as currently possible given inherent remote sync weaknesses. No small task with a system that can be complex and massive in size. (I had a ticket today asking about syncing two 100GB+ databases. That’s a ton of data, for any sync method.)