Gotta datamine you however they can.
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I work with clients such as NPR, PRI, and printers in the UK, China, Japan, and India, and Dropbox has been the preferred & essential file-sharing / folder-syncing solution for many years for tons of very large businesses that are anything but amateur hobbyists. Sadly it’s gotten more and more kludgy and I’m not even sure how well my computer can deal with the new version’s memory needs.
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Stuff like this makes me glad I deleted my Dropbox account back when they added Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors.
I primarily use iCloud Drive with a 200GB plan for $3/month (the next step up is 2TB for $10/month), but it helps that I’m pretty much all-in on the Apple ecosystem. They recently updated their iCloud for Windows tools in the Windows Store to support partial sync and placeholder files the same way that OneDrive does, and full-on folder sharing (as opposed to sharing individual files) is coming this fall. Outside of iTunes, Apple’s services department has always had a history of being a bit lackluster, but iCloud has come a long way since launch, and I think someone over at Apple Park has finally (heh) lit a fire under the right people’s asses. Another benefit of being all-in on Apple is that Photos will use your iCloud storage when you turn on iCloud Photo Library, which obviates the need to use their tedious and clunky “photo stream” service to wirelessly sync pictures and video back to a computer.
I also have free accounts for OneDrive and Google Drive (5GB each), and both work fine. OneDrive does occasionally prompt me to pay for a higher tier (while giving me a decline option labeled “stay basic”, which amuses me), but that’s really my only gripe with it. Both have sync apps for macOS that utilize Apple’s public Finder APIs for sync services, rather than installing a freaking kernel extension the way Dropbox does. Google Drive integrates with Docs and Sheets and whatnot so they all show up in Finder/Explorer (which is great if you’re deeply invested in those services or work with people who are) but, naturally, it also comes with the caveat that you’re now giving Google even more of your personal data.
OneDrive and Google Drive also have iOS apps that provide Files extension points, so you can access your content from an iOS device just like it was on iCloud Drive. Dropbox has a separate API that a lot of developers have taken advantage of to build deeper Dropbox integration directly into their apps (1Password comes immediately to mind), but any program that lets you choose where to store your files using the system-level file picker (which is most of them, these days) will work just fine with OneDrive or Google Drive.
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The death of iTunes means there’s a gaping hole in the useless bloatware market. Not surprised it filled so quickly.
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I went over to Mega.nz once Dropbox demanded that I unencrypt my Linux filesystem in order to keep using their service. Works much the same, generally pretty happy with it.
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The recent updates to Dropbox have been a mess for me. Smart Sync throws error notifications all the time. I’m not touching this desktop app.
I pay for Dropbox. If Apple’s sharing feature works at all, I will probably be dropping my Dropbox account and move everything there. Dropbox was fairly seamless and worked great; now, it’s worth the hassle to migrate.
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Isn’t Dropbox the company that spies on your files so it can share duplicates between users to save drive space and look for copyright violation claims in your private data?
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We had horrific sync issues and people found it really easy to hide files - it was like DB was working against us. Permissions really hard to manage, and everyone who installed it on their pc regretted it - kludge was the word.
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Searched. Sadly, cannot find. It’s all ‘collaborative sharing business teamware’ nonsense.
QFT.
I think you’ve hit on the same vibe that gives this…thing…the sickening aura of looking like what Google Sharepoint would look like; if for our sins we were consigned to a hell dimension where the laws of reality allowed such an unnatural scion to be birthed.
Hang on… help me out here… these are the “apps” that do
sshfs me@myhomesystem:/home/me/myfiles local_dir
right? 
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They appear to have reached the horrible tongue isopod stage of growth, where they can no longer survive on a nondestructive amount of the host’s blood and instead are trying to crudely and horribly mimic the functions of part of the host’s system; but I suspect that, while cynical, their calculation isn’t surprisng or irrational.
In addition to having investor expectations to pay; they’ve got competitors with massive platform dominance(neither Apple nor Microsoft nor Google make the nonfree tier of their respective offerings mandatory; but it’s not exactly a big secret that iCloud is architecturally privileged all over iOS, OneDrive has Office catering to it; and Google’s drive and sync are the platform assumption all over Android and ChromeOS); which can be hazardous to your health; and there’s also the fact that, while good frontends/interfaces/sync engines haven’t been commodified into the ground; the storage to back them substantially has.
Several outfits, most notably Amazon will sell you as much S3-shaped storage as you feel like buying for not much; so the list of potential competitors for a keep-it-simple-stupid storage/sync product isn’t restricted to people who can handle operating a datacenter; it’s anyone who can build a client that doesn’t suck(if memory serve JungleDisk was an early adopter of this technique; their thing being a handy abstraction layer over resold S3 service.)
Dropbox has the maturity and name recognition; but they presumably faced the choice of either sticking to what they are good at and keeping it clean and competent(but running the distinct risk of attrition between platform lock-in giveaways and new contenders enabled by infrastructure startup costs being close to zero); or of gruesomely debasing themselves in the hopes of locking in enough of their current customers to achieve at least a modicum of price power and stickiness.
Hopefully those responsible feel like the technically and aesthetically compromised shells they are; but what they did wasn’t crazy.
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Syncthing is really great. As long as you have at least two of your devices in your network of devices are connected at any one time, all of your changes will get synced without having to have any data on anybody else’s computer (much less Dropbox’s rather leaky servers).
Completely free (in both senses of the word), and works on every major platform (except iOS): Windows, Android, Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac.
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I felt like this would be ideal for me, but among my close to ten devices (conforming to the flavors you listed) I have one iPhone that needs to share a password file with the others. The file is stored on Google drive and synced to Dropbox for that use because I haven’t figured out how to use Google on the phone with my password app.
Just.
One.
File.
I’m not hosting a mini operating system to be able to use one file. Gotta find an alternative.
Yeah, iOS is a problem. There’s discussion of an iOS client for Syncthing, but it doesn’t look like something that’s going to happen anytime soon: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102
It seems like there should be some better solution. Doesn’t Apple have their own cloud-service, file-sync’ing thing? If you had some macOS device, you could probably set up something to sync that file to your iOS device using whatever Apple’s sync’ing thing is, and then use Syncthing to sync the file to your other devices.
Looking at Election vs NW.js seems like the no-win scenario.
Why is recompiling Chromium even an issue? I’m sure I don’t want to know.
Microsoft (or one of their many heads anyways) seems to get it.
Skype is still Skype. Skype for Business and Teams are the Enterprise products.
As far as I know, iCloud stack is running entirely on Google Cloud, so even the big guys are not above doing it.
I remember my Skype becoming very Snapchat like for a while there
