Dropbox has no plans to add support for Apple Silicon

[TheDevil_LLC]

@alahmnat

@t3knomanser

While I imagine the dropbox client has to do some ugly filesystem stuff to power its sync, I still gotta wonder about how ugly it is

For some inexplicable goddamn reason, Dropbox seems to think it’s necessary to build a kernel extension in order to sync files.

It isn’t.

No competing cloud storage provider that supports the Mac has chosen the path they took. Google already has native Apple Silicon support in Drive, and they’re historically miserable at incorporating changes to the Apple ecosystem into their products. It turns out, Apple is kind of down on kexts these days, but that’s far from a new development (kexts have been on the way out since basically 10.7 Lion). The fact that Dropbox hasn’t come up with any sort of development timetable for moving to a less invasive means of syncing your content to their servers after all these years just smacks of rank incompetence, or at the very least unconscionable pigheadedness.

Also just as a periodic reminder, they employ Condoleezza Rice as a board member, and I kind of prefer to support companies that don’t directly hire war criminals.

FWIW - Box (not to be confused with Dropbox) does uses a kernel extension to enable sync, and the current version of Box is incompatible with M1-based Macs as a result. Box does offer a public beta that supports sync capability, but it requires Reduced Security Mode be enabled in order to run (don’t do this). And it also relies on Rosetta which means it has the same battery-drain problem as Dropbox.

Link for the curious - https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500004479962-Box-Drive-support-on-devices-with-M1-chips

[beschizza]

@cosmotic

It’s not just Rosetta that kills the battery, it’s that dropbox is an Electron app.

That would explain it. There’s no in-house expertise for writing apps using MacOS’s native SDKs and APIs and such. And they’re landlords, so the idea of hiring people and creating something requiring maintenance and updates is anathema.

[hotel]

Alternatives-wise, Nextcloud is excellent, and there are numerous commercial providers (can’t recommend any, since I self-host it).

The client isn’t gorgeous, but it works everywhere, and has been reliable for me on Linux and macOS for several years.

My main use of it is on the desktop though, so I’m vague about the client’s resource consumption.

ETA: the Android client is perfectly respectable. It’s the desktop ones that could use a bit of UI/UX love.

[cosmotic]

They used to have a native app that worked a lot better.

[alahmnat]

Every good idea that gets flooded with VC money seems to go this way: great native app with a good experience → lots of customers and positive promotion from those customers → VC money arrives → push to SaaS model → native app replaced with electron app for “efficiency” reasons → customer base enthusiasm falters → company gets bought by Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook.

1Password, for example, is currently on step 5.

[woodster]

iCloud Drive is good these days. Onedrive is acceptable. Google drive kind of confuses me as a pure cloud storage solution. But all are better than Dropbox (not more user friendly, except iCloud Drive if you’re on Mac) but much lighter on resources.
Am not up on the more niche options because I have to use all the above options…