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Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

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Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#91

Post by caycep »

AlexandrB wrote: post #29
rjh29 wrote: post #4

So far this year they've discontinued Paper (app), Passwords, Send and Track, Vault and Capture. Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones! Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.

> Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point. Ironically I stopped using Dropbox when they started trying to branch out into all the other stuff. I doubt I'll go back at this point though.

what did you end up using for file storage?

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#92

Post by doctorpangloss »

Mistletoe wrote: post #65
doctorpangloss wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay… but then Google Drive is cheaper and has all these other features, so I switched to it, and stopped paying Dropbox, so I guess you’re wrong?

Lower the price below Google Drive and be better at being Google Drive than Google is. It wouldn't be that hard. You wouldn't need to be more expensive if you weren't pissing money away on acquisitions no one wants all the time.

ah yes, make your product cheaper than the same thing from company that has the greatest number of free software offerings with the largest user bases in the world

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#93

Post by gcr »

faramarz wrote: post #77

Well, saw that coming and too bad because for a moment and before notion took off, it had a chance. I gave up using it when critical notes I wrote in offline mode in the subway did not sync as I was lead to believe. Never touched it again.

Does notion have a proper offline sync mode these days? I was under the impression that it doesn’t either

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#94

Post by Apocryphon »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #18

The way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch. Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago! Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the p…

The revenge of BrandonM...

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#95

Post by dunham »

gcr wrote: post #89
dunham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote off paper when they announced (later 2019) that everyone would be migrated to the new storage in a few months and then kept pushing the date out over the next four years. It seemed that they were not allocating any resources to the project. I did check back every year or so for entertainment purposes. Mine was migrated in November of 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075409/https://www.dropb...

To my best understanding, my old paper documents were just deleted. I can still log into the old paper.Dropbox.com but see an empty list. I assume this means my account was never migrated.

Around November 2024, mine were all moved to a folder tree "Migrated Paper Docs" in my dropbox in a folder tree, as .paper files. The web UI says the folder has 84 decedents. My backup, done through the API years ago has 118, but there may be some deleted ones in there.

If I go to paper.dropbox.com, I only see six under "starred" in the left hand side (after unfolding the tree) and two in the main area. After opening another starred one, which links into dropbox, the main area now shows three.

So the migration to dropbox did mostly work for me, but whatever was left at paper.dropbox.com is messed up.

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#96

Post by artdigital »

jez wrote: post #55
patapong wrote: post #10

I am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used. I would lo…

If you’re open to third-party sync clients, Maestral supports this: https://maestral.app/docs/mignore I’ve been loving Maestral so far, it’s just the syncing, none of the other stuff. It has some downsides (it can’t upload symlinks but it can download them, and it doesn’t have LAN sync) but it’s super lightweight.

AFAIK Maestral doesn’t have block level diff and sync which is the main reason (for me) to use Dropbox: their superior sync engine

I have Maestral (and rclone) running on my raspbi but wouldn’t use it for things like sparsebundle syncing

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#97

Post by mickael-kerjean »

patapong wrote: post #10

I am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used. I would lo…

> Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html

I made a plugin that make this possible from the Filestash client (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). If you navigate to /public/{shareID}/ you will see your site

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#98

Post by guelo »

figassis wrote: post #62
ianstormtaylor wrote: post #18

The way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch. Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago! Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the p…

Dropbox saw that the only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box, and they did not like it. Also, we kept criticizing Dropbox for moving away from a "folder that syncs". I agree with a folder that syncs. Today I use dropbox, but I do my best to avoid interacting with it, because just clicking on the menubar icon makes me upset that no feature there is what I actually need. No sensible ignore rules, etc. B…

They're not even a "folder that syncs" anymore, at least on android if you make a folder "available offline" (which should be the default to begin with) it stores it internally to the dropbox app where it can't be accessed by other apps. There is another button "Save to device", but that's just a one-time snapshot of the file that won't stay in sync. I deleted my account after they pulled that enshitification.

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#99

Post by blibble »

margalabargala wrote: post #69
aborsy wrote: post #47

Dropbox is example of a bad company. Why Dropbox doesn’t offer features adjacent to sync, like: end to end encryption for consumers, backup solutions like backblaze, S3-like buckets, controls like with S3 (like those related to IAM), tools to monitor folders and see analytics, flexible storage plans, equivalent of the Firefox/Bitwarden send, equivalent of services like ProtonDrive, and stop locking down ordinary feat…

Not only that, but also for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. They won't last.

the company lost $500 million last year, it's possible that comment might still be correct

Re: Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

#100

Post by everfrustrated »

hs86 wrote: post #76
typpilol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox has one key advantage. Block based syncing.

Didn't Google add this in October 2024: https://support.google.com/a/answer/7577057?hl=en The changelog states: "Added support for “differential” uploads. When large files are edited, Drive for desktop will now upload only the parts of the file that changed."

TIL. For some reason I thought Drive for Desktop was discontinued years ago. Nice to see the regular updates.
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