File access on smartphone

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 18 September 2015 19:03:11 David Carlson wrote:
> I don't know if Johnny or Fred is confused.  GnuCash is a program that
> runs on a Windows, Linux or Mac computer.  It creates and works with
> data files, one data file or several if the user wants.
> 
> If you copy that data file to your Android device, you cannot do very
> much with it.  As far as I know the only Android program that
> recognizes the GnuCash data file format is the GnuCash Android app,
> which you can get from the Google Play store.  It is still under
> development and is missing several features that the GnuCash computer
> program has..
> 
GnuCash on Android can import from a GnuCash data file. It will only import what it can handle 
itself. I agree not all of GnuCash' features are available on GnuCash Android.

I also don't think it ever had the intention of becoming a full blown version of GnuCash on 
Android.

> If you are talking about a different app the actually accesses your
> Windows, Linux or Mac computer and runs the GnuCash program remotely
> from your Android device, you are not accessing a file, but the
> GnuCash program.  Then theGnuCash computer program is opening the
> data file, and that file is not on the Android device.
> 
That's indeed what Fred and Dale suggested. I can understand your confusion if you're not 
familiar with this kind of applications.

> I have no personal experience with remote access to the GnuCash
> program.  I would be very wary of running the GnuCash program from
> any type of remote terminal, as it is somewhat fragile and does not
> like some of the issues that are common to remote access, such as
> loss of connections, to name only one. Security is another potential
> problem when there are multiple computers and multiple communication
> channels being used together.
> 
Those are generic warnings, which may or may not apply depending on how the remove PC 
application actually functions.

For example VNC mirrors an existing login session on the remote PC. Should the network 
connection break, the existing session simply continues to run and you can reconnect to it as if 
nothing happened. GnuCash is never exposed to the network.

On the other hand VNC doesn't come with encryption, so the screen data is sent unprotected 
and can in theory be intercepted. There are more advanced techniques to overcome this but 
that's probably getting way off topic.

I believe (but haven't tried myself) Teamviewer works similarly in that it mirrors an existing 
login session. I don't know if it implements encryption.

Regards,

Geert