Dropbox Planning to Add Native Apple Silicon Support to Mac App in First Half of 2022 [Updated]

[MacRumors]

Update 9:45 a.m.: In a reply on Twitter, Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston apologized for the confusion sparked by the "not ideal" support responses and said that Dropbox is "certainly supporting Apple silicon" with a native Apple silicon build planned for release in the first half of next year. Original article below.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1453762478479843332

Dropbox appears to have no plans to natively support Apple silicon Macs, almost a year after the first Macs with the M1 chip became available.

An official Dropbox support thread, shared by Mitchell Hashimoto on Twitter, reveals a fiasco around native support for Apple silicon Macs. Dropbox is seemingly insisting that a significant number of community members will have to vote for native Apple silicon support for it to be implemented. There are also multiple repetitious requests with different phrasing, fragmenting users' votes for support.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1453394500848537605

In July, responses from Dropbox staff on the thread explained that "this idea is going to need a bit more support before we share your suggestion with our team," and flagged Apple silicon support as in need of more votes. A month ago, Dropbox staff again replied to the thread requesting native Apple silicon support, saying that Dropbox will continue to be compatible with all devices that run supported versions of macOS using Apple's Rosetta translation layer.

Additional complaints in the thread claim that Dropbox with Rosetta hemorrhages MacBook battery life and uses a disproportionate amount of memory.

While Dropbox could still natively support Apple silicon Macs in the future, the way in which the issue has been delegated to two standoffish responses on a support thread appears to have caused outrage, with the thread brimming with irate replies and claims that users are planning to move to rival services.

Google Drive was recently updated with native support for Apple silicon, and other services such as Microsoft OneDrive and Box are already testing native Apple silicon support.



Article Link: Dropbox Planning to Add Native Apple Silicon Support to Mac App in First Half of 2022 [Updated]

 

[alexjholland]

Cool. I was looking for an excuse to move everything on Dropbox over to Google Drive.

 

[Jens Engels]

Bye Dropbox.

 

[StrangeNoises]

I could've been all smug about NextCloud, but then I realised that still only works on Rosetta 2 as well. Ah well. Delivery fail today on my new Macbook Pro so they have 24 hours to fix it or i walk!

or... i was kinda looking for a macos app project to learn swift-ui on. properly native nextcloud client maybe ? probably not too ambitious and... tests the proposition that just writing fully native client apps for each platform works out better and cheaper in long run than trying to use multiplatform frameworks. (nextcloud is QT-based. and fugly on a mac as all QT-based apps are.)

People have been pointing out Maestral, as an alternative dropbox client. that's surely a bit precarious though if the communication protocols are all proprietary. at least i think nextcloud's protocols are open. i think...

 

[omglolbbq]

"Dropbox Seemingly Has No Plans to Keep Their Apple Users"​

 

[Darth Tulhu]

Time to sell your DropBox stock?

 

[UltimateSyn]

Guess I seemingly have no plans to ever use Dropbox again.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

Their loss. They've made some strange decisions over the past several years, and the value of their services has dropped accordingly. There is such a good range of services at the moment that it's hard to keep falling back on the block-sync and reliability as strong features.

Box is just an all round better service, if you're after the best bang for buck.

 

[Stella]

If dropbox wants to stay competitive ( which I think they've lost anyway ), they'll have to support Apple Silicon...

 

[ChrisHardie]

I switched to the Maestral Dropbox client which runs natively on Silicon, and it’s been great: https://maestral.app/

 

[fwmireault]

They will definitely support natively Dropbox in the future. It might not be worth it now, but in a few years when the majority of active mac users will be on Apple silicon, Dropbox will not be able to ignore them. To be honest they are lazy, but I don’t think they want to sacrifice their Apple users market

 

[tmmacops]

DropBox is still a thing?

 

[Shirasaki]

I don’t have much on Dropbox anyway, but I have a Windows PC so apple silicon support isn’t going to be a top concern.

With that being said, Apple silicon support has been spotty for many major applications. Acronis doesn’t offer preliminary support for Monterey atm, meaning Monterey backup is not possible. VSCode is not native enough either, as macOS keeps saying the app will not work on a future release of macOS.

People could just move away from Dropbox no problem, but software support has been lagging here and there. By 2022, if apple cuts off Rosetta from macOS 13, I dunno what macOS could’ve been after then. A platform without big enough software library will find it hard to become mainstream. Maybe apple still believe they have unlimited market power and hold all the cards. Who knows.

 

[Jimmdean]

well if it works it works, but then if you wait too long and it stops working you look stupid. some of these companies out there do not mind looking stupid though.

 

[polyphenol]

I dropped my paid Dropbox when they increased costs dramatically a while back.

I only retain a "free" account because of some widespread file sharing I do. But I have been intending to move away completely.

Used to be so appealing, but they have taken turn after turn to make people run away.

 

[MrGimper]

DropBox is still a thing?

It is, yes.

 

[kobaltz]

It's pretty simple. Dropbox seemingly has no plans to support apple silicon. I seemingly have no plans to support Dropbox.

 

[boss.king]

If you use Dropbox on your Mac (Intel or M1) do yourself a favour and check out Maestral. It's a lightweight 3rd party Dropbox client that doesn't chew up all your resources and also strips away all the extra crap that Dropbox has shovelled into their app over the years.

 

[iBluetooth]

I don't believe that they will not do a native version. Some supervisor, will probably overturn this when he reads this story, because otherwise they would be signalling their slow death.

 

[Konigi]

That is really bad. Any app claiming they have no plans to update their code to natively support Apple Silicons is basically saying they don't want to invest in Macs anymore. Because this is the future, and in 3 years, the majority of Macs will probably be running Apple Silicons. To me they are really saying they are dropping support altogether, it is just a matter of time.

I've been a paying customer of Dropbox for about 6 years, and as a faithful Mac customer, I will buy my first M-X machine in a year or two. Hopefully they will change their mind by then.

 

[blairh]

Dropbox will cave in due time.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Wow. How heavy is that "one switch in the compiler" (to make all Mac apps native)?

 

[businessnumbersmoneypeopl]

Somehow I thought that all major programs would have released M1 versions by now. Little did I know.

 

[joelhinch]

This company still exists?

 

[jonnysods]

I’ve been a Dropbox user for possibly a decade or more - it’s an I dispensable tool to my business. I have an M1 MBA and haven’t had issues on Rosetta.

I do how they go native though as I would love to see the improvements.