This workflow issue has affected our dev team too, so preventing it from changing the timestamp during sync would be ideal.
Is there any way to take this a step further and prevent the timestamp from changing unless changes are actually detected in the Field Group? I was able to hack something together to do this inside the core/json.php file, in the acf_write_json_field_group() method but the code wasn’t exactly clean.
It would probably be better if this could happen when the fields are saved to the DB so the updated timestamp never changes (and the JSON would be overwritten with the same timestamp), but I’m not sure how difficult this could be.
Having said all that, the scenario of one of our developers saving a Field Group without making any changes is pretty rare, the sync issue is a higher priority.
Thanks again for looking into this!
