Updates on Flashcard Sync

Dart

Member
Hey,

I've searched this forum for information about Flashcard Sync for Android. I saw that the biggest issue was finding a cloud provider that works seamlessly in and outside of China...
Are there any updates on that?
I think e.g. Baidu Cloud should be sufficient for that purpose, even if the connection might be slower outside of China.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It’s more than just slow, to be honest - a lot of sites in China are only intermittently accessible in the West at all.

Beyond that, two other problems. First off, no cloud sync service we’ve found has robust support for delta updates, i.e. only uploading the changed parts of a database - right now flashcard databases aren’t that big but in 4.0 they’ll be an order of magnitude bigger and we need them to sync efficiently. (None of them seem to offer the invisible fast background sync iCloud does either) Basically, we’d be putting in a lot of work to offer something that was really only a minimal improvement over backing up directly to / restoring directly from a cloud file service in our current app.

The other problem is that frankly there just aren’t that many people using Android tablets - I know a lot of forum users do, but on our overall stats Android tablets barely even register. So it’s hard to find enough potential users for this feature to justify implementing it.

We do however still plan to roll out our own sync service at some point, in which we also plan to include some support for online editing / review of cards for users on PCs or other devices we don’t support at all.
 

Bvo

探花
Mike,
just my 2 cents (again :)):
I think the app will be more useful if you'll put your effort on its integration with other learning apps and not will make your own flashcard system.
Anyway your FC system will be more weak than one of specialized apps.

PS: "weak" means not "technically limited", but "easy-to-use" from end-user POV.
Especially for beginners.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@Bvo - have to disagree there; there's a lot to be gained by having flashcards integrated closely with other Pleco functions. (and a lot more we're doing with that in 4.0) I'm also confident that our new flashcard system will be fully competitive in every respect to any other flashcard app (part of why we're taking so much time to get it right).

Also, the sort of integration you're talking about is really only feasible on Android; on iOS, which is where we make about 3/4 of our money, the ability of apps to talk directly to each other is extremely limited and even something as simple as tapping on a + button in a dictionary entry to add it to flashcards would be slow and awkward. So in our iPhone app we can't really have integrated flashcards unless we build a flashcard system ourselves.
 

Bvo

探花
OK, let's see the new FC - I hope it'll be really great :)
If iOS has that kind of limits - no much sense in the integration, indeed.
 

Dart

Member
Thanks for the answer and clarification :) (although it was not going in the direction I hoped for). Keep up the good work!
 
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