Android sync December 2023

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,014]

I'm starting this thread to make a place for thoughts about how well the Evernote Android app is syncing toward the end of 2023. There have been a lot of changes throughout the year, with some serious problems and some serious improvements. I had a really good experience last night, which I'm telling, not to doubt that problems remain, but to say that things can work surprisingly well. And I wonder how they're working now (not a couple of months ago) for others.

I was working late last night, on a home WiFi connection with strong Internet service, and near the end of my phone's battery (Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, just updated to Android 14). Like an idiot I kept typing, and in the middle of a word the phone died. I plugged it in and turned on my laptop. I honestly didn't know what I'd find. I'd done a green check-mark sync earlier, so I expected that everything prior to that point would be there, but wasn't sure about the last several paragraphs. When I fired up Evernote for Windows, it was absolutely all there, down to the last 2 letters I typed before the phone died. I was kind of stunned, TBH.

So this was a success story, but what do we learn from it? Apparently sync is indeed happening all the time, as it should under the new sync structure and procedures introduced in May 2023. Then what does the green check mark mean? What about in the note list, where one or more notes may have green corners indicating a need to sync? (Or at least they used to indicate that.) I have no idea. My slightly snarky take would be that they mean nothing, and have been left in the interface so that users who insist they need a manual sync button can think they have one. Or maybe if something has not quite synced at the second you stopped typing, a tap on the check or a pull down on the list will finish it up.

We should probably distinguish constant sync from background sync, though. I don't have any evidence that the Android app syncs while it is not currently in  use. And I'm confident that Internet blips along all the hops from a phone to Evernote's servers can and do affect syncing; I wouldn't expect what happened last night to happen every time necessarily.

Your thoughts? Please chime in!