Why are legacy sync options (WiFi and WebDAV) being discontinued?

Warning: Wi-Fi sync will not work with iOS 9 – we would recommend not upgrading to iOS 9 if you prefer to continue to use Wi-Fi sync.

We have a lot of customers, and a few of them (<1%) have asked why we won’t continue to offer our older wi-fi sync alongside our new Cloud Sync. The primary reason is that we want to provide the best sync solution possible. At one point, that solution was wi-fi sync, but that model is antiquated. One problem is that it is centered on the Mac being the hub. This limitation prevents users from solely using our iOS products, or if they are syncing more than one device it forces them to be near their Mac anytime they want to get changes from a device. There are also issues surrounding wi-fi itself. For example, several networks disable Bonjour discovery altogether so customers just can’t sync. We’ve found this often to be the case at cafes and hotels and even some home networks. Another issue with wi-fi sync is Apple’s frequent changing of their Bonjour and networking code. With each major OS release there are usually significant changes which we need to adapt to, and that gets increasingly difficult to do if you support anything but the latest OS.

There are also some pragmatic reasons to move to a new sync model. The resource demands to maintain two different sets of sync code squeeze resources from other areas of the app, like new features and bug fixes. It also means twice the testing, explaining two differences to the users, displaying the differences to users in the UI, updating the documentation, and troubleshooting two different sets of sync code. We appreciate hearing from the users that don’t want their encrypted data on a server. And we anticipated some people would not like our new Cloud Sync. However, we truly hope they will be willing to consider the benefits of our new sync solution and reconsider. As we’ve mentioned before, we aren’t turning off the old wi-fi sync right now. It will continue to exist side-by-side with the new Cloud Sync for a while. We also want to point out that we are not mandating people use this Cloud Sync; people can still decide to do their finances on a device without using any sort of sync solution. Many of our competitors force their users to keep all of their data in the cloud; we aren’t taking that path.

Syncing, while the concept is easy, is extremely hard to do. The majority of our customers want something that is easy to use, makes their data available anytime they want it, and just works. This is the end of goal of what we are delivering.

Cloud Sync data is secure – IGG uses total end-to-end encryption. The data is encrypted on the user’s device before it is transmitted to our servers over a secure TLS connection. The keys to decrypt the data are never shared, meaning that IGG staff cannot access the raw data even if they wanted to. The user can delete a cloud sync document from our servers using any iBank app and the data is instantly removed.