Windows has first-class support (obviously); but Samba gives Linux and BSD support that, in modern Desktop Environments, is exactly as good. Mobile devices don't tend to have OS-level support for it, but there are very good libraries to enable individual apps to speak the protocols (look at VLC's mobile apps.)
Even Apple has given up on their own file-sharing protocol (AFP) in favor of macOS machines just speaking SMB to one-another.
Yes, it's not workable over the public Internet. Neither is FTP, any more. If you've got a server somewhere far away, and want all your devices to put files on it, you're presumably versed with configuring servers, so go ahead and set up a WebDAV server on that box. Everything speaks that.
Uh, hell no. Never ever I'd expose a SMB server to the Internet. SMB is really picky when the link has packet loss or latency issues, plus the countless SMB-based security issues.
> Even Apple has given up on their own file-sharing protocol (AFP) in favor of macOS machines just speaking SMB to one-another.
Is there a way to tune SMB to work better over low bandwidth / high latency links? The last time I tried it through a VPN it was working at less than 10kb/s
But we're talking about picking a thing to replace FTP for the use-cases people were already using FTP for. It doesn't matter if it doesn't do something FTP already doesn't do, because presumably you were already not relying on that thing getting done.
FTP is used to exchange files, a task that HTTP/HTTPS and/or email and/or IM and/or XMPP and/or Skype and/or Slack and/or a hundred other services can do just as well if not better.
...But it does work on iOS. It's just not built in. For example, Transmit for iOS supports FTP, and includes a document provider extension so you can directly access files on FTP servers from any app that uses the standard document picker.
The post I replied to implies that iOS is (somehow) "artificially limited" to be unable to access FTP - or at least I interpreted it that way.
FWIW, I'm not convinced that "web-based" is a better alternative for read/write file access, assuming you mean file manager webapps. No OS can integrate those into the native file picker, so you can't avoid the inefficiency of manually uploading files after changing them. WebDAV works pretty well though, if that counts...
It's just needlessly exclusionary. One of the greatest things about "the web" is it's pretty accessible by anyone with a browser that's at least semi-mostly-standards-compliant.
Windows has first-class support (obviously); but Samba gives Linux and BSD support that, in modern Desktop Environments, is exactly as good. Mobile devices don't tend to have OS-level support for it, but there are very good libraries to enable individual apps to speak the protocols (look at VLC's mobile apps.)
Even Apple has given up on their own file-sharing protocol (AFP) in favor of macOS machines just speaking SMB to one-another.
Yes, it's not workable over the public Internet. Neither is FTP, any more. If you've got a server somewhere far away, and want all your devices to put files on it, you're presumably versed with configuring servers, so go ahead and set up a WebDAV server on that box. Everything speaks that.