A self-hosted photo and file backup app for Android built around one job: background upload that actually survives Doze and OEM battery killers

android app real project •• multiple requests

Nextcloud and Immich users keep reporting that auto-upload silently stops on modern Android, so photos they assumed were safely backed up never actually leave the phone. The opportunity is a backend-agnostic backup app (WebDAV/S3/Immich/Nextcloud) whose entire value proposition is bulletproof background upload plus a 'prove every file landed' audit, not another gallery UI. The audience is the large self-hosted / de-Googled crowd that refuses Google Photos but cannot trust any current client to run unattended.

builder note

The product is not another file picker, it is the background-execution engine — and on Android 15+, persistent foreground services are capped at 6 hours/24h and cannot start from background, so design around WorkManager intermittent jobs with exponential backoff, not a permanently-running service. Per-OEM dontkillmyapp onboarding and the 'prove every file landed' audit screen are the differentiators users in these threads keep begging for. Stay backend-agnostic (WebDAV/S3/Immich/Nextcloud) so you are not betting on one server.

landscape (4 existing solutions)

The gap persists because reliable unattended upload on modern Android is a hard OS-level problem (Doze, App Standby, and aggressive OEM battery management on Samsung/Xiaomi/OnePlus silently terminate sync jobs), not a missing feature. Every self-hosted backup client fights the same battle, and users still discover months later that photos they assumed were backed up never uploaded.

Nextcloud Android app (auto-upload) Auto-upload still silently drops files, hits unresolved conflicts, and skips uploads on current Android. Maintainers themselves opened a 'call for debug help' thread acknowledging it is not reliable, and there is no built-in 'verify every photo uploaded' / manual resync button users keep requesting.

Immich mobile app Same failure class. Their own tracker has repeated high-engagement reports such as 'Android: background sync works 0% of the time' (#21921, 48 comments) and 'Background backup on android still not working reliably' (#24111, updated 2026-05-22). Backup is tied to Immich's server, so it is not a general-purpose backend-agnostic option.

Syncthing / Syncthing-Fork (Catfriend1) Can continuously sync a camera folder, but it is general file-sync rather than photo/gallery-aware, setup is too complex for non-technical users, and it is subject to the same Android background-execution limits, so jobs still get killed on aggressive OEMs.

PhotoSync (commercial) More dependable transfers, closed-source and paid. PhotoSync's Android Autotransfer does run a periodic background job every 15 minutes without requiring the app to be open and continues after device restarts — so the unattended-backup gap is narrower than it appears. The remaining gap vs this signal is that PhotoSync is not self-hosted-first (no Immich/Nextcloud-as-primary-target mode) and is not open-source, which are the actual blockers for the de-Googled crowd.

sources (1)

other https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/16993 "it is completely unreliable for me as well" 2026-05-05

self-hostedphoto-backupbackground-syncandroidprivacy