US Patent 12001401 Enhanced co-authoring and file syncing

In an implementation, a sync engine running on a computing device synchronizes a local copy of a file with a copy of the file hosted by an online file service. An application on the device receives a request/command to open the file and responsively opens a temporary copy of the file in memory. The application populates the temporary file with content from the local copy of the file and also establishes a connection between the application and a co-authoring service. Note that the connection between the application and the co-authoring session bypasses the sync engine such, when connected to the co-authoring service, the application is able to synchronize the content in the temporary copy of the file with content in the hosted copy of the file over the connection.