> [Has] one very valid use case left: easy file sharing, especially for shared hosting.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not easy. Not secure. Not user friendly. Not anything good. Have an iPhone and need to FTP something? Don't have installation rights on your Windows workstation and need to FTP something? Unpleasant if not confusing as all hell.

Dropbox or a Dropbox-like program is significantly easier to get people on board with.

Any "ecosystem" built around FTP is rotten to the core. Blow it up and get rid of it as soon as you can.

Some vendors insist on using FTP because reasons, but those reasons are always laziness. I can't be the only one that would prefer they use ssh/scp/rsync with actual keys so I can be certain the entity uploading a file is actually them and not some random dude who sniffed the plain-text password off the wire.

Huh?

Windows explorer has FTP built into the shell. As does every other desktop OS.

If you care about file integrity, you want to out of band to verify the signatures on the binary anyway.

Dropbox is blocked in most commercial networks and offers no assurance of anything.

Yes, I'm sure walking your accounting department through how to use the command-line FTP tool in Windows is going to work out fantastically well.

Versus drag and drop file to this page. There you go. It's uploading.

That's why I said Dropbox or a Dropbox-like service, of which there are hundreds. Microsoft SharePoint is but one example.

Not that shell. The UI shell. Explorer. You can browse FTP sites just like network file systems, including drag and drop.

Go to Start->Run.

Type ftp://ftp-site/path/to/file. Drag and drop to your hearts content.

When I worked ftp (with accounting departments ironically), the advice was not to do that because the client often corrupted files.

The protocol you want is SMB.

Windows has first-class support (obviously); but Samba gives Linux and BSD support that, in modern Desktop Environments, is exactly as good. Mobile devices don't tend to have OS-level support for it, but there are very good libraries to enable individual apps to speak the protocols (look at VLC's mobile apps.)

Even Apple has given up on their own file-sharing protocol (AFP) in favor of macOS machines just speaking SMB to one-another.

Yes, it's not workable over the public Internet. Neither is FTP, any more. If you've got a server somewhere far away, and want all your devices to put files on it, you're presumably versed with configuring servers, so go ahead and set up a WebDAV server on that box. Everything speaks that.

> The protocol you want is SMB.

Uh, hell no. Never ever I'd expose a SMB server to the Internet. SMB is really picky when the link has packet loss or latency issues, plus the countless SMB-based security issues.

> Even Apple has given up on their own file-sharing protocol (AFP) in favor of macOS machines just speaking SMB to one-another.

TimeMachine still depends on AFP.

> TimeMachine still depends on AFP.

No, it doesn't:

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Net...

Is there a way to tune SMB to work better over low bandwidth / high latency links? The last time I tried it through a VPN it was working at less than 10kb/s

AFAIK no, other than increasing frame size, CIFS is more or less an inverse latency gauge.

I wonder if GP is pulling our legs about WebDAV. Yuck.

> Mobile devices don't tend to have OS-level support for it...

Yeah, nope. Dead out of the gate. Thanks for playing.

Mobile devices don't tend to have OS-level support for anything, though.

The GP comment:

> FTP clients are native to every popular OS, from Android to Windows (only exceptions I know are Win Mobile and iOS)

To rephrase: only 1/3 of mobile OSes support FTP.

Anything web-based works fine on the phone. FTP and SMB do not.

Not working on iOS is like saying "Oh, this road doesn't work with German made cars. That's not a big deal, is it?"

But we're talking about picking a thing to replace FTP for the use-cases people were already using FTP for. It doesn't matter if it doesn't do something FTP already doesn't do, because presumably you were already not relying on that thing getting done.

FTP is used to exchange files, a task that HTTP/HTTPS and/or email and/or IM and/or XMPP and/or Skype and/or Slack and/or a hundred other services can do just as well if not better.

More like German made cars have been artificially limited so they can't use certain roads.

...But it does work on iOS. It's just not built in. For example, Transmit for iOS supports FTP, and includes a document provider extension so you can directly access files on FTP servers from any app that uses the standard document picker.

https://panic.com/transmit-ios/

Searching the App Store I also see some apps for SMB, but I don't know whether they have document provider extensions.

You can also send faxes from iOS. What's your point?

The post I replied to implies that iOS is (somehow) "artificially limited" to be unable to access FTP - or at least I interpreted it that way.

FWIW, I'm not convinced that "web-based" is a better alternative for read/write file access, assuming you mean file manager webapps. No OS can integrate those into the native file picker, so you can't avoid the inefficiency of manually uploading files after changing them. WebDAV works pretty well though, if that counts...

It's just needlessly exclusionary. One of the greatest things about "the web" is it's pretty accessible by anyone with a browser that's at least semi-mostly-standards-compliant.

No one uses Windows mobile, that comment was hardly fair. Pretty sure Android is 80%+ share.

even mobile windows/ios/android have ftp and variants support via software but not native.