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

BGPL said:
2TB iCloud Drive for $10/month. I can share documents, videos, any link with anyone, and I have native support on Macs, and pretty good support even on Windows.
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My understanding is that iCloud Drive only supports file and folder sharing with other iCloud accounts. I have a folder of several hundred docs in a three deep structure that I share with several people using Dropbox.
i would have to ask the Windows users to create Apple IDs and install iCloud for Windows, which is quite an imposition when they already use Dropbox.
I am very annoyed by Dropbox's attitude but it does work fine for me under Rosetta.
Suggestions welcome.
 
Once my M1 Mac mini arrives next week, I'll start thinking of alternatives.

That said, Sync.com seems to be looking better and better with each passing day: both for my personal needs as well as my business needs...
 
Obviously, in Dropbox's eyes, the number of Apple users are too small for Dropbox to justify man power to write the universal app.
 
Apple Knowledge Navigator said:
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.
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They need a bigger personal storage tier
 
johnmarki said:
Let me use this as a pulpit to spew my belief, and use of, a personal NAS! Not as cheap or "easy" as DB or GD, but, after 1-2 years, you'll be free of subscriptions, have 100% control of your media/files/digital life, and free of corporate malware/adware/spyware.
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But your drives are on prem unless you have another backup in a different physical location. That is the risk with NAS
 
OK but why do people care?

Is there something the article isn't telling us? Why would anyone care if it's supported natively (as opposed to Rosetta translation)?

Dropbox is used for file storage, does the app really need to be rewritten to support a new instruction set? What's wrong with simply using it via rosetta?
 
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If your app is written by competent developers and doesn't do some really really weird #### changing to a different architecture should be a simple recompile, some betatesting and lastly a bunch of minor tweaks.

So they either they don't want you to use their SW or you have very good reason not to want to user their SW.
 
PsykX said:
I mean... they have to make it native someday, but... will we really see speed gains ?
The performance of this app is 99% based on storage speed + Internet speed, rather than CPU/GPU speed.

The only benefit for us Mac users is to rely less and less on Rosetta 2, and to eventually be able to uninstall it. Am I correct ?
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This is what I'm confused about too? Why the hell does anyone care?
 
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KPOM said:
Microsoft says a native version is coming by the end of the year. It does seem strange that it is taking so long, given that they have already rewritten the rest of Office 365. Do these apps access some low-level links in the OS that make them more difficult to port than other apps?
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It may be more a function of what gets most bang for the buck. The rest of Office365 is launched on-demand by a user, and therefore the initial translation cost at launch is high from a user experience perspective. On the other hand, OneDrive launches once and then runs in the background for a long period of time.
 
"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...this idea is going to need a bit more support before we share your suggestion with our team..."
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I can't control everyone else, but I have voted with my wallet - DBX can share this with its finance team.

And this is merely one of many causes. Some other reasons include:
  1. No 200/500/1000GB plan
  2. Expensive monthly plan trying to make me choose annual plan
  3. Comical 2GB free storage so most of colleagues / friends simply use Google Drive
  4. iCloud Drive has better photo management system and is generally improving
  5. Battery life takes a hit running Dropbox on my M1 Air (the final nail)
 
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I have a free 25GB Dropbox through the app so in total it is 27GB but it will be back to 2GB since the additional 25GB is only good for 1 year...

Anyway, are all these cloud hosting/storage services using their own servers or like iCloud which uses some Google Drive servers?

Does Microsoft, Dropbox, and others have their own servers?
 
fwmireault said:
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
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In ~18 months, users will start getting warnings that Rosetta 2 apps will not be supported in a future version of macOS.
 
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Bug-Creator said:
If your app is written by competent developers and doesn't do some really really weird #### changing to a different architecture should be a simple recompile, some betatesting and lastly a bunch of minor tweaks.

So they either they don't want you to use their SW or you have very good reason not to want to user their SW.
Click to expand...

But your Dropbox software still serves its purpose whether it's written for AArch64 or x86-64.

I mean, let's say they take the effort to make it native, what's the benefit to the consumer?

I'm not being snarky here, I legit don't understand why anybody cares about this. How much work does the app actually do, that running it via Rosetta is such a big no-no.
 
tmmacops said:
DropBox is still a thing?
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When COVID forced us to go remote, CUNY adopted Dropbox on a university wide level, and it works amazingly well.

My videography team and I use it exclusively with dedicated external drives, and it keeps 2-4TB of data in sync at all times, and the speeds often max out at 1Gbps upload when syncing.

So yes, it's a thing, and hopefully they support Apple Silicon, because we also got OneDrive access, and OneDrive is absolute garbage compared to Dropbox.
 
dwaite said:
In ~18 months, users will start getting warnings that Rosetta 2 apps will not be supported in a future version of macOS.
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Is this true? Why would Apple drop support for x86 applications? I think it's pretty cool what they have with Rosetta2, why not leave it as a feature?
 
Wow - I’m not optimistic of their future with an approach like that.

Maybe they’ll get bought by Microsoft like Skype and disappear into oblivion.
 
I uninstalled the Dropbox client and cancelled my paid plan when I noticed one of their processes was making calls out any time I used QuickTime Player to open any file (regardless of the file location). Still don't have a good replacement though.
 
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