> I was a bit surprised that the official client suddenly disappeared though.

Here is when syncthing dropped the official Android client [0] so you can read through their rationale and the HN response at the time.

I am not an Android developer but I do follow this space; I had the impression at the time that it really was mostly about the dev cycles that would have been required and nobody willing to do the work.

I do wonder why they don't just make the fork an official Syncthing project, it seems like the obvious solution would be to officially bless it. I can only guess the maintainer likes their independence.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895718

Well they also probably don’t want the reputation hit if the fork ends up doing some kind of rug pull.

From a very cursory look it seems like syncthing-fork uses ContentResolver and other stuff from SAF, so it seems they made it work.

The official maintainer of syncthing-fork indeed stopped publishing to Google Play, but it seems some other guy is doing that now for him.

The play store version isn't updated anymore. You should switch to F-Droid.