OneSync Now Supports OneDrive Shared Folders

TL;DR I’ve added support for OneDrive shared folders to OneSync. The new version is in Google Play beta channel and will be pushed to the official channel when I’ll feel confident there are not nasty new bugs lurking there. Probably sometime next week.

In OneDrive when someone shares a folder with you and you accept it, the shared folder shows up under “Shared”. If the owner gives you read/write permission (“User can edit”) you can “Add to my OneDrive”. This shared folder will be seen among your other folders in OneDrive / Files. The official OneDrive desktop client would sync this folder to your PC, exactly like any of your other folders.

Immeadiately after this new “Add to my OneDrive” feature was added I checked OneSync code and found that although at the UI level the shared folder behaves as if it were a normal folder, it’s not the case at the API level. Simply put, the shared folder requires special treatment which is not there in the OneDrive API from Microsoft. Feedback was submitted to OneDrive team

New API not able to access shared-to-me folders even after “Add to my OneDrive”

It was on August 20, 2015. On September 17 the OneDrive team flagged this ticket with “In the Plans”. In the meantime it climbed to the top of most-voted tickets in “Developer” category. Two days ago, December 11, I got email notification “Boom! It’s done” with link to the newly added API. Yesterday I updated my code. Today there is a new public beta version of OneSync supporting shared folders.

This is what I think the relationship between developers and a platform company should be. The OneDrive team did not promise to respond to all feedback but they promised to read them all and would respond to the most voted tickets. In this case the response was positive: “In the plan”. It took them 4 months to execute “the plan” but today it’s indeed done. They kept their promise. In the ticket on UserVoice there are not many words, nobody threatened to migrate to other platforms, no yelling. Just normal communication among mature grownups where each one did their part. Sadly this is not usual experience indie devs have when giving feedback to other big platform companies. They should take note. We don’t need or even want to be “evangelized”, just give us a sincere two-way communication channel.

P.S. you can “add to my OneDrive” only if the owner gives you read/write permission. Shared folders with read-only permission and shared files cannot be added to “My OneDrive”, cannot be synced by OneDrive official desktop client, and also cannot be synced by OneSync.