Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

It would be a shame to see Dropbox decline. They're the last big player to maintain a Linux sync client that just works reliably. I've tried to host Nextcloud and tried Syncthing as well, but Dropbox has always worked for when I just want the problem solved without worrying about something going down.

Open to recommendations...

I have been one of the very early users. Maybe from the first weeks (if not days). It used to be such a good app and service. So good that I used to ask my friends why they didn't already use it. That was a few many years ago; at best. Since then, Dropbox has steadily been going downhill and with intent, at least for a consumer. Quite a few folks are ditching its paid plan (including me), just using its free tier (to tiny tasks like notes sync etc) and moving the bulk of their data storage elsewhere (like I did - reluctantly to object storage providers via many FOSS CLI tools; would have loved to keep paying for the old Dropbox). Hostile pricing was not the only concern; hostile UX, an insanely bloated app, and breaking features (because sure, those are not bugs) galore.

Now the native file sync is a really doomed space for individual customers (because I have never explored what's out there exclusively for enterprise). Dropbox is well Dropbox New. Anyone in their right minds, or if anyone has a device other than an Apple device, will not even think of relying on the (even after years of complaints) opaque and buggy iCloud. Google Drive, while most reliable technically, is a really bad bet as a filesystem file sync tool; besides, they are much more bloated than Dropbox, and their suite offerings are intertwined with it so deep. Smaller offerings like Tresorit (though most "native" among its peers) are too buggy and have questionable practices like that of pCloud, etc.

So while the entire personal/consumer filesystem file sync system has gone to the gutter now, Dropbox is still a bad solution among quite worse ones and that's really sad. From storing 100s of GBs at one point, I am back to just ~300 MB in Dropbox now. Just couldn't trust it anymore after it broke my workflows quite a few times and still keeps trying with that sudden pop-up of "Update Available" which is not really an app update (app updates silently in the bg; all hail Electron), that is actually a sly way to make you enable its folder on File Provider API feature. I am sure it is a good feature for many but for heaven's sake the very reason I started using (and still use Dropbox for) is because it syncs my complete files across systems. The lest you can do is not actively try to make me click on it. Besides I don't want any other bloody thing. Just give me that feature, and only that, and take my money and in a native app while we are at it. There are LLMs now, give us back a native app at least.

Seeing the focus on "AI" I am pretty sure very soon I'll have to take even that ~300 MB elsewhere.

PS. Their support is absolutely questionable. I've had a chance to contact them for some bugs. Goodness, it took literally weeks, and dozens of messages, to make them accept it's a bug and even then they didn't really accept they just stopped responding (so I assume they accepted it. Besides it was never fixed :D).

If you want E2E, encrypt your data yourself. By far the simplest, safest solution to the problem.

It's mobile devices not having user-facing files as first-class citizens. The mobile era started just as Dropbox started to solve a computer era problem. Bad timing.

I'd argue Dropbox became as big as they are thanks to mobile taking off.

In a computer only world there are myriads of other solutions, elegant or not.

Most work computers were permanently plugged into network shared folders, and would have over the VPN access for on the road salesmen etc.

Home users mostly didn't care about cloud storage or shareable folders, those who did could get away with ftp (basically supported everywhere, like straight in explorer windows)

Dropbox flourished because most people got a second device, always connected, but with no decent file management. Many of us used Dropbox not even for sync but just to properly handle files.