mSecure Support
iphone syncing issue
Mike - mSecure
Hi Peter,
In order to sync manually on the iPhone, tap and hold anywhere on the record list, and then pull down.
Appreciate the tip for the less than obvious method for doing a sync. You need to put an icon in the menu area for doing this.
As a test I made a change to the database on my android and synced it up to dropbox. The sync report on the android device appeared so briefly at the bottom of the screen it was unreadable. I then forced a manual sync on the iphone. I could see the syncing icon on the bottom of the screen but there was never a report as to what took place. I was not shown any report that records were changed. I confirmed that change was synced by opening the record.
I am sure glad I have my ver 3/4 still operating because I don't think ver 6 is ready for deployment.
Thank you,
peter
Mike - mSecure
If you are only using an Android device, the sync button is in the menu.
Why do you think mSecure 6 wasn't ready for deployment? If you are dealing with an issue, let me know what it is so we can either help you work around it or get it fixed. We can't fix issues you may be encountering if you don't tell us what's wrong.
The app was in public beta for more than 6 months. We tested internally for much longer than that. Any issues you might be dealing with right now did not surface during the beta or internal testing. The manual syncing has been the same since mSecure 5, so what you reported here is not even a bug, but bugs happen in real life even when an app is ready for release. All we can do is work as hard as possible to fix them once we are aware of them. If people don't tell us what they are, and instead only complain about whatever it is they don't like in the app, any bugs that do exist will never be fixed.
I use msecure on mac, windows, android and ios so perhaps I have a different perspective than most users. The user interface for android and ios should be closer aligned. The lack of a sync button on the ios version may not be a bug but I feel it is certainly a design deficiency. I have not found any documentation that explains the pull down action. The lack of sync results reporting on both ios and android is a design deficiency. I did a sync from my windows desktop, not having changed any records and the sync report said the number of records changed was the entire database. Luckily that proved to be wrong because when I then synced my android device I did not find any changed or duplicated records so I have no idea why that report occurred.
I apologize for not knowing about the ios pull down for syncing. When I was part of the ver 5 beta program I don't recall that issue. I never deployed ver 5 because I disliked the UI so much. I will continue to run ver 6 for evaluation purposes but I still very much dislike the UI. The ver 3/4 programs have a much easier to use UI.
peter
I totally agree with Peter.
Version 4 was awsome. I am not happy with the actual UI and the sync problem.
Sync workaround:
The sync problem (Ver. 6) seems to be based on a lack of msecure to recognize when
there is a difference in the data (something like "change flag set").
Creating or changeing an entry while the devices have msecure opened at the same time
forces an immediate sync successfully.
Oliver
Mike - mSecure
@Oliver There is no known issues with the sync not being triggered automatically. If you make a change on one device, you should never need to perform a manual sync. When you perform a manual sync, you are doing a full pull of the data from the server, which is not a good thing. It doesn't hurt anything to do it, but it can take a very long time to sync. The app was designed to perform syncs automatically to only sync the smallest bits of data when the user makes changes. If the app is not syncing automatically after you make changes, then we can talk about potential problems you are running into, but there shouldn't be any problems. There can always be a bug that I'm not aware of, but I don't know of any that cause the app to not sync automatically when it should.
Now, to be more granular, the Android, iOS and Mac versions use push notifications in order to sync changes, and it can happen very quickly. However, the Windows version doesn't have push functionality. This means that it has to wait for a timer to be triggered and only then will it know data needs to be synced if there are changes made. This means that if you make a change on any device, and both apps are unlocked, the change won't sync to Windows for at least one minute. On the other hand, if you make a change on any device and you have the Android, iOS or Mac apps opened, you should see the sync take place within seconds.
However, the app was not designed to be used in this manner. There is no use case that we know of where more than one mSecure app needs to be open at the same time. If there is one, that's fine, but we don't know of one. So, if the Windows app is closed or locked, then when it is opened or unlocked, it will perform a sync immediately. This means you should never have to worry about pressing the manual sync button unless something is wrong with the app.
I was wondering why the manual sync was taking so long under v6. The reason I moved to manual sync is a number of years ago I had a auto sync end up duplicating all 900 records in the sync file. It was a lot of work to clean up the mess and then have to rebuild the databases on the other devices that had gotten the duplicated data automatically. I do not open msecure on multiple devices at the same time. For me, manually triggering upgrades or sync to programs allows me to control when things are done and to limit the possibility to create issues that happen at the wrong time and across multiple devices. Microsoft forcing upgrades has taught me not to trust publishers to get things right all the time and then leave end users to clean up their mess.
I use msecure practically every day but my version of choice remains 3/4. In addition to using msecure though, I also have an opensource password manager working on all my devices as a fall back . My needs are pretty basic so the new features in v5/6 are of no interest to me.
You've provided a lot of very good information answering questions in the forums about syncing and how mobile versions differ in their operation. I hope msecure will improve the documentation for the various platforms so users don't have to wade through forums to get answers.
Thank you,
peter
Mike - mSecure
No problem at all Peter, and please let me know should you need further assistance with anything in the app or have any other questions about the new version.
Peter
V6 on the iphone has no way to sync manually if auto sync is turned off. This is a very big issue f or me as I always turn off auto sync in all my devices. I prefer to handle syncing manually. I consider this oversight a major bug making the program broken.
peter