The way I hear Aaron Levie speak, I would have thought Box had more market share.
Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox works. Put aside all the concerns over War Crimes or Spying, or Security, Dropbox simply works. Every mobile platform is supported. Every desktop platform is supported. Sharing, Teams, direct links, all the core features are there. Anyone can safely recommend and share Dropbox files with their Grandma (with a PC still running XP), or their Mac loving parents, or their weird hipster friend running Gentoo GNU/L…
Agreed, it's just got to work. We're working on an alternative: https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/
Dunno why you're getting down voted. Sounds like great news to me!
Will you have a Linux client? (I'm sure that's the least favorite question new services like this get.)
I ripped Dropbox out by the roots on all of my systems some time back because of the contempt they display for their users. New, more privacy- and security-conscious services are nice (as are ones that don't break their users' machines and then go weaselly when caught). But I really want the option to use my own infrastructure for apps that want to store data somewhere remote.
Especially for file-based services, the only argument for Dropbox is "because they're big and probably already installed"[2]. I'd deeply appreciate it if these sorts of apps would add a preference-pane for scp, at least. I have no idea if the crusty-folks-like-me market is big enough to constitute a noticeable bump in app store sales or not, but I promise, given two competing apps, I'll forgive a lot of other warts in and pay more for the one that lets me own my own data.
[1] I know cloud is king, but there are a lot of us out here that want to own our own data, rather than having the cloud-overlords rent it back to us. The Omnigroup's apps are great examples of this - you can use their sync servers, but you can also (and I do) run your own WebDAV server for it. Works great, and I have paid the Omnigroup substantially more than any other single mobile app vendor for their apps.
[2] Synchronization is difficult enough in some contexts that I completely get writing something more complicated there, but then we're not talking about Dropbox or their competitors anymore.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#43Given that Apple was spending in the order of $1 billion to store iCloud data in AWS I don't think this claim is exactly credible.
Dropbox reportedly had to move 500PB of data off of AWS which at a very naive $0.03 per GB per month would only be around $180MM per year. $0.03 is probably higher than the rate dropbox pays per GB but I'm ignoring network ingress/egress costs.
From those back of the envelope calculations I think it's safe to say that iCloud is very likely larger, or at least a similar size to Dropbox.
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastr...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3045436/data-center-cloud/app...
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#44I hope on Android they support SAF (Storage Access Framework) soon. Since I don't want to include N cloud SDKs for each point-to-point integration, my app only supports what SAF does -- and sadly dropbox support is missing.
isn't that what cloudrail claims to provide?
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#45Given that Apple was spending in the order of $1 billion to store iCloud data in AWS I don't think this claim is exactly credible. Dropbox reportedly had to move 500PB of data off of AWS which at a very naive $0.03 per GB per month would only be around $180MM per year. $0.03 is probably higher than the rate dropbox pays per GB but I'm ignoring network ingress/egress costs. From those back of the envelope calculations…
Maybe. This report seems to just take Dropbox Google Microsoft and Box into account. But is iCloud really that big when you talk about usage? They store tons of data but most of it might be just iOS backups which are activated by default for every user. Consider that usage or not.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#46I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
It depends on what you're doing. If you're in the Apple ecosystem with a Mac and iPhone/iPad, the iCloud photo storage is really awesome. For us, it took away the hassle of managing iOS storage.
But... the iCloud Drive function is immature and unreliable.
Right now, I subscribe to Dropbox Pro and iCloud. I'll probably drop Dropbox as their photo story sucks, and they don't make key features available to "Pro" users like full text search.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#47Given that Apple was spending in the order of $1 billion to store iCloud data in AWS I don't think this claim is exactly credible. Dropbox reportedly had to move 500PB of data off of AWS which at a very naive $0.03 per GB per month would only be around $180MM per year. $0.03 is probably higher than the rate dropbox pays per GB but I'm ignoring network ingress/egress costs. From those back of the envelope calculations…
Maybe. This report seems to just take Dropbox Google Microsoft and Box into account. But is iCloud really that big when you talk about usage? They store tons of data but most of it might be just iOS backups which are activated by default for every user. Consider that usage or not.
I think so - and the fact that it's so in the background speaks to how well the user experience is designed for iCloud. Apple pretty much surreptitiously hides the backup of contacts, photos, calendars, email (yes - a lot of people use iCloud mail), and lastly documents. The fact that Apple was so late to the game on iCloud Drive was that a lot of the shit that the average person doesn't want to manually back-up and monitor are handled in the background by Apple ("magically" to use their term.) I personally love Dropbox, but I would find it a nuisance to manage my contacts, or anything else beyond my documents and occasional photos backup.
Therefore, regardless of manual input necessary, it should still count as usage. I imagine a lot of people store backups on Dropbox, and that looks like it's counted in the article.
Yet, I am kind of surprised that the prevalence of Android software doesn't correlate to Google Drive market share.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox works. Put aside all the concerns over War Crimes or Spying, or Security, Dropbox simply works. Every mobile platform is supported. Every desktop platform is supported. Sharing, Teams, direct links, all the core features are there. Anyone can safely recommend and share Dropbox files with their Grandma (with a PC still running XP), or their Mac loving parents, or their weird hipster friend running Gentoo GNU/L…
Agreed, it's just got to work. We're working on an alternative: https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/
Any plans for an API?
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#49I'm struggling to understand why. It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.
> It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space. That's three major questions begged in a single sentence, followed by 3 more in the next. Perhaps if you tried to back up each of those claims, you'd have an easier time understanding. “Poor business model” would be the first place…
Poor business model: I refer to their freemium offering which is poor compared to competitors.
Security: If you think that's a judgement call, fine, if you think that the dropbox hack is a judgment issue.
Pricing: For Joe Bloggs, 100GB is generally enough. Google handily offers that for $2. With Dropbox, there's a cliff - a few gig for free or a terabyte for $10/m. Why no middle ground? Both Apple and Google offer scaled plans, why doesn't Dropbox?
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. This report seems to just take Dropbox Google Microsoft and Box into account. But is iCloud really that big when you talk about usage? They store tons of data but most of it might be just iOS backups which are activated by default for every user. Consider that usage or not.
I think so - and the fact that it's so in the background speaks to how well the user experience is designed for iCloud. Apple pretty much surreptitiously hides the backup of contacts, photos, calendars, email (yes - a lot of people use iCloud mail), and lastly documents. The fact that Apple was so late to the game on iCloud Drive was that a lot of the shit that the average person doesn't want to manually back-up and…
Re: Google Drive being less than you expect... Lots of handset makers and carriers put their own crappy cloud backup software on there and attempt to push that.
e.g. Verizon has their own cloud storage service.... it's annoying on Android, not sure if it exists on iOS.