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A comment on Shutting down public FTP services. Parent comment

Re:Shutting down public FTP services by astrodust on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:24PM (#14199150)
> Mobile devices don't tend to have OS-level support for it...

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Shutting down public FTP services by derefr on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:27PM (#14199169)
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.

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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by astrodust on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:34PM (#14199219)
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?"

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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by derefr on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:40PM (#14199263)
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.
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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by astrodust on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:13AM (#14200383)
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.
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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @08:06PM (#14199391)
More like German made cars have been artificially limited so they can't use certain roads.
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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by comex on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @11:38PM (#14200253)
...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.

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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by astrodust on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:19AM (#14200402)
You can also send faxes from iOS. What's your point?
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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by comex on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:57AM (#14200533)
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...

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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by astrodust on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:19AM (#14200401)
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.
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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by ReverseCold on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @09:04PM (#14199687)
No one uses Windows mobile, that comment was hardly fair. Pretty sure Android is 80%+ share.
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Re:Shutting down public FTP services by kalmari on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @03:15AM (#14201076)
even mobile windows/ios/android have ftp and variants support via software but not native.
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