I don't meant to take away from the article, but it makes me sad to see such awesome people building and writing about really cool bespoke solutions. It's obvious that Arun knows their stuff and is able to communicate it clearly.
The sad thing is that Dropbox Product has so heavily dropped the ball that users like myself (from back in 2009) have switched away in droves over the past few years.
I understand that Dropbox core functionality wouldn't have been enough to multiply the valuation of the company to what investors expected. But it would have been nice to not jam collaboration features into the product and mess up the simple, platform-native UI with it's current abomination. I'd pay $10/mo forever if I could get the 2010-esque Dropbox Mac client and sync service back since it's way better than anything else (especially iCloud).
They've really gone downhill by adding unwanted bloat, and it just seems to be accelerating. Meanwhile their core product is degrading. Abandonment of the Public folder in spite of a huge outcry from customers was disappointing. The user experience is plastered with advertising to try their other products, even if you turn off all the relevant notification settings. And lately I've been running into subtle functionality bugs in the client.
Would happily give my money to a competitor focused on a lean, reliable product.
I can understand the need for a company to be constantly trying to add value to their product, but that tendency to be changing so much can easily cause you to lose sight of what made you popular in the first place.
I use Dropbox personally to keep documents synced between my computer and my wife's and also to grab documents I need from the web if I'm on another computer. I occasionally share a folder if I need to give a large number of files to someone.
I recently had a notification come up on the dropbox taskbar icon and it popped up this huge window that looked like a massive electron app. In the old days, there wasn't even a UI, just a context menu that also showed the state of the sync.
For me, Dropbox provides the most benefit when it's not visible, running invisibly in the background doing it's thing.
I don't know, I think it's pretty great. Can't live without it.
The client's UI is a bit odd, but at the end of the day it's really good at what it's supposed to do: Syncing files.
Performance is also great: I'm using multiple machines to write code on, and I keep my local git repo on Dropbox. I can literally save a change on my notebook and run it on some other machine 3 seconds later.
Thank you! The reason I ditched Dropbox was because of the bloated Mac client. Maestral looks like it might bring back the 2010-esque Dropbox client feeling (fast and efficient).
I mentioned above that I switched away; iCloud Drive is pretty mediocre since syncing sometimes doesn’t happen instantly and there’s no way to force-sync. I’ll probably move my Mac synced preferences back to Dropbox if this works well. Though I’m also worried about them deprecating their APIs since that seems to be a popular move these days.
The Linux Dropbox client is essentially abandoned (it's broken both functionally and aesthetically). On this platform, it definitely does not even acceptably do what it is supposed to do, so an alternative is good for the company.
I wonder though, why Dropbox limits the syncing functionality at the API level (by not offering partial file sync).
Does Dropbox use proper filesystems? I considered using Amazon's S3 to host a repo but apparently it may not work properly since it's not a 'proper' file system
They’re entirely separate things. Dropbox syncs a local directory on your computer. S3 is a remotely accessible object store.
So yes, you can put a git repo in Dropbox if you want. But that’s still an altogether different thing than “hosting” a git repo like you might do with GitHub or Gitlab.
I believe they meant they'll fuse-mount an S3 store to a local directory and store a git repo in that. And presumably Dropbox will refuse to sync it because it requires the synced directory to be on one of a few specific filesystems.
This - we are a business user for dropbox, on windows the task tray is a mess, the collab / editing / paper features so annoying. Sync I think is still OK if you can ignore everything on the website.
I do wish you could PAY for a basic version (maybe make the collab stuff free as part of some trial or something).
I think the reality is between Apple, Google, and Microsoft, their core feature is being given away for free or packaged with existing devices that ppl are buying anyway. Then they’re further integrated into those services. This is on top of a move away from files towards mobile and cloud computing, in addition to hitting a wall with consumers who want/need a Dropbox client and at the prices Dropbox sets. They have to have the business users to sustain themselves, and those business users want collaboration tools as a differentiator to not jump ship.
Dropbox is in a bad spot, I think in part because they haven’t focused deeply enough on real collaboration tools or other related product spaces.
I will never ever trust my most important files to companies for whom storage is not even their fifth most important concern. Dropbox will be my primary storage solution for that reason for the foreseeable future unless the fuck up real bad.
This way of thinking doesn’t quite make sense to me. Since those companies are huge, they could within them contain an organization that has more resources than Dropbox dedicated to storage. This organization will be completely focused on that goal. What if some company buys Dropbox?
Amen too much unwanted bloat, wouldve even been okay if they got opt in opt out options but NO the inconsistencies are getting shoved down my throat like I owe them some money
Honestly, it works. Never had a bit of trouble. I might not be a mega power user, but all my stuff is there and I just don’t think about it. I moved away from Dropbox about 2 years ago – because I got sick of the shitty invasive macOS client software – and I regret nothing.
Bonus: invoking Spotlight on an iPad and having your files just show up is kinda magic.
I'm the GP, and I also switched to iCloud Drive. But thanks to a comment above I've moved my _sync folder back to Dropbox and use Maestral as my Mac Dropbox client and it's been working great for the past 18 hours or so.
I switched _sync back because Alfred and other apps warned that using iCloud Drive for sync doesn't work great because it doesn't always update properly, and I've found that to be the case.
Got badly burned by iCloud Drive in the early days (and also Apple Photo's losing a ton of my photos). That was a long time ago though. Probably time to revisit it and give it a try.
I do like how iCloud and Onedrive have become so tightly integrated/transparent. (Benefits and banes).
One of the things that have dramatically hampered my experience on HN lately is irrelevant or tangentially related comments. I want to see relevant insightful comments or other people's experience of better way of doing things or any potential pitfalls of what's being recommended in the posted article. Instead, the comments are usually end up being complaining about some products or some features. And it becomes worse, after awhile it becomes the same broken record of constant complaining.
The sad thing is that Dropbox Product has so heavily dropped the ball that users like myself (from back in 2009) have switched away in droves over the past few years.
I understand that Dropbox core functionality wouldn't have been enough to multiply the valuation of the company to what investors expected. But it would have been nice to not jam collaboration features into the product and mess up the simple, platform-native UI with it's current abomination. I'd pay $10/mo forever if I could get the 2010-esque Dropbox Mac client and sync service back since it's way better than anything else (especially iCloud).