One of the goals of many Emacs users is to be able read and write Org entries on their phones or tablets. There are several solutions for this. On the Android platform, one of the most popular was Orgzly. Sadly, Orgzly is no longer under development but its user base stepped up with orgzly-revived to keep the project alive.
Erik L. Arneson is an Orgzly-revived user and wants to automatically sync the Orgzly-revived files on his phone with the Emacs files on his computer. Since those files are always open on his computer, syncing them was a problem.
Arneson found a way to do this using ownCloud and the built-in syncing functions of Orgzly-revived. One problem was that the files on his computer had to be marked auto-revert so that Emacs would reread them when they were changed on disk.
His solution for this was to put all the files that he was sharing with Orgzly-revived in a separate directory and then use a directory local variable to specify that all files in that directory should be marked as auto-revert.
Orgzly-revived is, of course, just one app that allows sharing files between Emacs and your phone or tablet, and it’s for Android only. There are other apps, some for Android, some for iOS that do roughly the same thing. All of them, in order to be useful, need to be able to sync files between Emacs and the remote device. The details of doing this will doubtless vary but it’s likely that the files on Emacs will need to be marked auto-revert so Arneson’s trick of using a directory local variable is worth knowing.