Pleco Management Team - Sync Across Devices

[erwinhero]

I've been using your software for 9 years. For a majority of those years your dedicated, paid users have requested sync over multiple devices since we are not a consolidated-device culture.

Mikelove and the Pleco team have explained, through dozens of threads, that this is a "difficult" process. These are just excuses to dodge a real issue. I've lived in China for a decade, and problems can be navigated when there is a will.

Please dedicate yourself and your team to make this happen.

Thank you.

 

[mikelove]

It's not that we can't do it, it's that we have other priorities - we get maybe 3x as many requests for Minnan support (which is actually coming - at least in user databases - in 4.0, so yay on that) as we do for multi-device sync. It would be a lot of work, and it's hard to justify delaying other exciting features to make it a priority when the interest from users is limited - we really don't have a lot of multi-device users relative to our overall customer base, tablets are about 5% or our installed base on Android and 10% on iOS.

Also, while it's buggy/unreliable and we don't actually recommend using it - and would certainly not recommend someone buy Pleco or buy an iPhone/iPad with the expectation that it will work well for them - a lot of our iOS users are actually humming along quite well with our current iCloud sync support, which further reduces the demand for / interest in our adding our own proprietary sync system.

Also, the financials are awkward for a proprietary sync system - we would incur ongoing costs to run it, and so would want to have some sort of ongoing revenue from people using it, but we don't currently offer subscriptions and we're a little reluctant to add them (and worried about blowback from users if we do, even if only as an optional add-on).

We're hopeful that after 4.0 is out we'll be able to add minor new features much more efficiently, which will free up more time to work on big side projects like sync, and 4.0's new database schema should also make sync much easier at whatever point we implement it, but there simply isn't enough demand for it to put ahead of the other things we're currently working on.