Business model for free apps eg. UniqTec Tasks&notes for MS

But I thought that was OK. As far as I understand (and I might be wrong), it provides a notes function on the smartphone. It *syncs* with MS Exchange, but AkrutoSync seems to be able to connect with the app on the phone and sync it with the Outlook client on your laptop. I think it plays the role of an Exchange server in its communication with the app on the smartphone.

Anyway, the reason why I was asking for public anecdotes was because I thought it was free, and free makes me wonder how much I can depend on its ongoing support going forward. I am just planning my way ahead right now, I don't actually use the smartphone yet (though I have a data plan an everything). So I'm not familiar with the Google Play store. I assumed that TNMSE was free because there was no monetary amount shown on the Google Play store, whereas in contrast, other items on the Google Play store did have a monetary amount displayed.

I'm being particularly careful about TNMSE because it is the smartphone counterpart to AkrutoSync. Positive anecdotes about that particular combination would be reassuring, wherease negative feedback would be informative. Compared the CompanionLink, the lesser amount of information on AkrutoSync to be a gap that I would like to make up for by more fully sussing out people's experience with the latter. There seems to be a greater proportion of positive reviews about AkrutoSync than CompanionLink, but shorter history and lesser amount of information makes it less reliable, in my humble and subjective opinion.

I think you want the sort of sync we do on bigger machines. Plus you want it stone cold reliable. So far I've yet to see that.

I checked more than once about TNMSE and if you don't have a MS Exchange Server for it to work with, I don't see what use it is.
Bob

It seems to be a perennial topic online.

Odd, these days,reliable syncing seems to be a holy grail. I'm a throwback in the sense that reliable sync was normal (so it seemed, coming from a Palm background).

I found an example of my web wanderings that gave me the idea that AkrutoSync presents a Exchange interface to the Android phone. Since I can't post URLs, google "Akruto Sync runs on your computer and makes your computer appear to mobile devices like a reduced functionality Microsoft Exchange server" with quotes.

Here I use so many machines that I have my home base workhorse PC and for mobile I stick with Gmail. When I get back to base, it downloads it all and I can do a little cleanup and I'm done. There are folk that want better than that.
Bob

AkrutoSync is relatively new, but highly regarded it seems. I'm hoping that anecdotes will give a idea of the likelihood of success for me. It's not as good as actual testing, but I'm hoping to make my first decision the final one.

As for gmail, I'm not too concerned about email. I use IMAP anyway. Contacts, calendar, and notes are things I don't want on the cloud, and which I don't want corrupted through data loss or errors. I'm having a hard time seeing this desire as being an exceptionally high bar.

But then, I've been spoiled. It's remarkable that we've actually gone backward on this. Isn't the high tech ecosystem suppose to drive improvement?

Fogey signing off

Not too long ago the Palm Pilot nailed what many folk though was a great Calendar and more. To this day I've yet to find anything that good.
Bob

I am trying to be a believer that capitalism is the answer, despite local hiccups. The Amiga died when it was the best thing around, solaris is gone, Palm faded, etc, etc

Some other considerations are surfacing as I roll up my sleeves with follow up reading. That is, Akruto syncs with native Android apps for calendar and contacts, but requires another vendor's product for notes. A 4th party. Many players now: Android (cyanogenmod), M$ Outlook client on Win 7, AkrutoSync, and TNMSE. Akruto has to ensure that it adapts to changes in any and all of these players. The more players, the greater the challenge and higher the risk.

But I don't think this is much different then the only other contender, CompanionLink. Instead of TNMSE, they expect DejaOffice on the phone. It might be a bit less risky because the phone apps come from one source (DejaOffice) whereas the phone apps in AkrutoSync's case come from both Android and TNMSE. In fact, I need to dig a bit further to ensure that CyanogenMod has the contacts & calendar apps that unmodified Android does (or rather, *less* modified, since carriers always have their own customizations).

We never know how the future will treat the players and the relationship between them. For example, I was told on another forum that the reason CompanionLink ran into (hopefully temporary) compatibility problems was that Android unilaterally changed the interface. Not being a developer, I don't know at what level of abstraction (and I don't even know what abstraction layers exist), and I'm paraphrasing the explanation. By unilaterally, I mean that it threw CompanionLink for a loop. So the relationship between the players in any solution is important, as is the forecast looking in to the future. The more players, the more risk.

Reading http://www.howtogeek.com/207692/yes-every-freeware-download-site-is-serving-crapware-heres-the-proof/ and what I'm seeing in Android AD SUPPORTED software is unnerving.

Companies have apparently moved to any app is a platform to serve up ads.

But I digress. I worry for the old Windows PC as this crapware is going to piss off new and current users.
Bob

I'll get & AkrutoSync & TNMSE from Google Play store or OEM site.

Interesting to note that CNET was top of the list at your linked page.

Despite all these cautionary measures for privacy, I think I'll migrate any sensitive ID numbers and passwords from my contacts to notes. TNMSE is not native Android, which I'm now seeing as a good thing. My short experience with Android doesn't engender confidence. I've been asked to log in to my Google account for things like following links on the TNMSE page and for upgrading Android. Maybe that's normal for this generation, but things weren't always like that.

Yes, if you're download apps from the wild. But are things any better for linux based alternatives? They simply don't have such a wild ecosystem of offerings. In fact, you can install cygwin and get Linux-like operation as well as Windows, and simply ignore the bulk of the Windows apps offerings in the wild.

The more active the ecosystem, the more noise. But hopefully, the true good sources are still there. MiKTeX, Cygwin, Google Play, Inkscape. I haven't download Spybot S&D and Malware Bytes recently, but hopefully, they are still available from the vendor site, not some download central. Unfortunately, PDF writers seem to have gone totally to download centrals, and as you say, they evil among such download sites seem to be winning.