Agree! Though to be clear I’m not saying it’s necessarily amazing software - just that a lot of Synology users seem to like it!
I was surprised when I was on a Synology subreddit (I think, or maybe the Synology forums) looking for details about upgrading RAM how many people seem really passionate about the various synology apps.
That surprised me, too. A while back they nerfed some feature in Video Station, their IMHO crummy Plex analog. Wow, did people ever get bent! Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone actually used and liked it. It worked alright but the client apps were/are a giant leap behind alternatives for Plex or Jellyfin.
But no, the built-in option seemed to have a league of fans in the Venn overlap of “people who want to stream video off their NAS” and “people willing to settle for an oddball solution”.
Weirdly, Audio Station is the best app I've found for streaming podcasts from my Synology (given the quirks of podcast hoarding in practice). Admittedly, I haven't looked in a few years... maybe I should get on that.
That seems plausible. I don't think there's as much competition among audio apps, and I (perhaps naively) suspect there might be a lower bar for UI polish. We were using XMMS back in the day, and while it looked cool, it wasn't the paragon of user-friendly design.
I seriously want it to work well. How do you find 1 out of 10,000+ pictures you've taken in the last 20 years without spending hours self categorizing beforehand?
I just went through a complete restore of my NAS from backup and then migration to a new NAS. It was flawlessly executed through Hyperbackup so I don't agree with you at all.
Hyperbackup is good, but that is a core function of a NAS no? I was speaking more about apps like Photos, Videos, Surveillance, Docker, Web hosting. Things a NAS usually don't and shouldn't do.
The software stack of usability is severely missing. So they have a lot of software that kind of works, but none of it well.
In that case I'd rather have the cheaper Unifi that only does storage.