Mobile Client

tfks/dropbear-android is a native Android app for browsing and viewing a synced bucket from your phone. It is not the desktop daemon ported to a phone, and it isn't a sync peer.

What it is

Dropbear's daemon model assumes a normal POSIX userland that mobile OSes don't provide: a real directory it can watch, a long-lived background process, and user-controlled extended attributes for marking shelved files. Phones don't offer that, so the Android app is a separate, native, read-only viewer. It talks directly to the bucket over the S3 API with its own credential, lists the namespace from the (tiny) manifests, and fetches a blob only when you open a file — the same on-demand model the desktop's materialized views use, applied to a phone that's shelved by default.

It never uploads, never writes a manifest, and never participates in conflict or tombstone handling. Anything you can do on the phone is safe to do while a desktop device is mid-sync.

Credentials

Each phone gets its own read-only, whole-bucket object storage token, scoped to that device. A lost or stolen phone is a single credential revocation, not a fleet-wide key rotation — but until revoked, that token can read every root in the bucket. There's no per-root scoping without a broker server in front of the bucket, so treat the phone's credential with the same care as the bucket's read-only access as a whole.

Installing

The app isn't in an app store yet.

Manual: grab an APK from the releases page and side-load it.
Obtainium: point Obtainium at the releases URL above to track new releases and auto-update the app the way a store install would, without a store.

What it isn't

Not a second sync engine — it doesn't watch, hash, upload, or write a manifest.
Not a gateway client — no server sits between the phone and the bucket.
Not encrypted client-side — the bucket layout and blob contents are whatever the desktop devices wrote. Encrypt sensitive files yourself if that matters to you.
No iOS equivalent yet — see Gaps & Known Issues.