Rclone Exporer on Android asking for password

Hey,

as I didn't find an other way to access my rclone remote via a unrooted android smartphone, I used the rclone explorer application by kaczmarkiewiczp.

It was wokring fine till yesterday.
Out of nowhere the app said I had to type in the passward for my rclone configuration file as it was password protected.

I didn't receive that error on my tablet using the same config file and the same application.

Reinstalling the app or deleting app data doesn't help, right when importing the rclone config file I am getting asked for a password. I was pretty sure I didn't protect the config file with any password.

Did anybody experience the same?

LG

There is someone with a similar problem on https://github.com/kaczmarkiewiczp/rcloneExplorer/issues/259, but the weird thing is that it only seems to affect one of your devices.

In general, the password prompt trigger is pretty dumb, it just checks whether rclone exits !=0 when asked not to query for a password (--ask-password=false). Unfortunately, Patryk's (bobolyne here) version will not log errors for this action even if you enable logging, so a logfile is pointless.

Can you try it out with my version? It is a bit smarter and will actually check if the file is unencrypted, encrypted or corrupted.

What is the result with that?

Oh perfect, after posting this topic and searching further, I found the issue in github, too.

I was planning to answer over there to ask the user if he ist also using a Samsung Note 9. Maybe the issue is connected somehow with updating to Android 10 this friday.

Because on my Note 9 it doesn't work anymore. The tablet it still does, runs Android 9 (Samsung Tab S5e).

I'm happy to read that someone is still working in that app. I already wrote kaczmarkiewiczp a while ago to get some information from him, if he still works on that app but never got an answer.

So using your updated version of the app, I don't get the error anymore!

That's great! Does it work now on all your devices?

Yeah, so about half a year ago I wrote a few emails to kaczmarkiewiczp, but at the time he was very busy and it does not seem to have changed much, so I just published the version that I was working on anyway.

I'm currently working on bringing this to the Play Store, because with manual updates, most users just don't bother. I'm hoping to have that ready in February, so be sure to check back.

Yes, it works in my Samsung Note 9 where it didn't before and also in my Tab S5e.

Is it also possible to ask you for features to add in future releases? Guess there is still enough on the map?

Yes. You can always ask, but whether you actually get the feature depends on a few factors like maintainer availability, usefulness for the general audience and focus (e.g. we probably won't include a music player).

What would be the best way to make suggestions die features?

Via mail?

I don't need an included music player, but I was happy to read, there ist some work going on to make remotes accessable from other apps. That would be awesome but maybe I just didn't get the function and intention right.

But als far as I know till now it is not possible to get any information about folder size via the app. And also it would be nice to choose real black as main colour of the apps theme instead of the dark grey. Would bei nice for amoled screens. Camera Upload might be nice, too. But these features are not that important :wink:

By creating an issue on GitHub. This allows other stakeholders to voice their support or opinion.

It is basically rclone serve android, but with a compatibility layer to convert between Android APIs and Rclone APIs. The documentation has more details. We can already do the reverse, e.g. like an android type rclone backend to access SD cards and USB thumb drives.

The music player was maybe a bad example - so the idea is that rather than implementing every useful functionality, I'd rather improve compatibility and interoperability with existing, specialized apps like VLC for media play or Google Docs for editing documents.

The features all sound reasonable, so maybe create a GitHub issue for each of them.

So it would be possible to access crypted cloud contend provided by rclone explorer from VLC app?

Would be cool, if that would also be possible from within kodi.

But did I get that right? That feature is still in the testing and therefore not included in the last release?
Because I wanted to give it a try with a test remote but all I see under Settings > File Access is Enable SAF Client Preview which might be the reverse, you were writing about?

Exactly.

When VLC and we have each worked out their bugs, yes, but we're not there yet.

EDIT: I guess I did not clarify that this applies to the new mechanism - for media streaming you can already do that with the integrated http server (which does rclone serve http in background). This works by tapping on an item or by selecting Serve in the item or folder menu.

That is the way I play videos from my remotes for now. It works good for me to just tap the video and it plays via MXPlayer.

But in general it would be cool to access remotes from other file managers or gallery apps, as for example files and pictures are only shown in a list and not in a grid in rclone explorer. So specific apps for that usage are miles ahead concerning features and I would not be neccessary to implement that many features in rclone explorer. Making files accessable from other apps would be enough.

A little sneak peak:

Media players can use the same interface, but most don't bother. We might be able to reach them with the new-ish DLNA server.

Looks good!
Thanks for working on that app!

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