Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox has been willing to get their hands dirty in their pursuit of user-friendliness since day one, especially on the Mac¹. Didn't find any examples where they walk it back; usually they stick to their guns with a few minor tweaks (and top-of-HN-discussion PR replies).

Dropbox Hasn't Learned Their Lesson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12619722 (2016) "You seem to completely miss the point. It's not about the feature itself, it's your way of "hacking" or "injecting" Dropbox features into places the user didn't expect."

How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 (2016) "It's very strange that after I remove Dropbox from the accessibility list you think it's ok to add it back in again."

Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136546 (2015) "It does, however, 'QueryBasicFileInformation' and and 'QueryDirectory' when I create a file on my desktop."

The Tech Behind Dropbox’s New User Experience on Mobile, Part 2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8203164 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ieinternals/2014/09/04/cave... (2014) "what good is a code-signed executable when that executable can simply download a payload from the internet like this Dropbox installer does"

Dropship — successor to torrents? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478567 (2011) "Apparently Dropbox notices they already have that file, and instead of you uploading it they just make it appear in your account." CEO Drew Houston actually did the PR for the cleanup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2482712

¹ http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/03/22/disabling-dropboxs-haxie/ (2011) "Dropbox injects code into the Finder in order to draw the green and blue badges atop your icons"

> Dropbox has been willing to get their hands dirty in their pursuit of user-friendliness since day one, especially on the Mac¹.

Where Apple is providing zero of the APIs you typically find on more open platforms, like Linux and Windows.

Can't say I blame them. The other option would be to have a completely user-hostile installer and we all know how well they fare with the general public.

Installation these days has to be one click, or nothing at all. Otherwise you've lost your user.

> The other option would be to have a completely user-hostile installer

I'm unconvinced that a horrible installer is the only alternative, but even if it were, you are asserting that you see subverting OS security mechanisms and intentionally ignoring user intent as somehow not user-hostile?

From my perspective, DB was kinda nifty when it first came out. The gap has been filled by commodity software for folks who can deal with self-hosting, so I'm personally happy. For other people, everyone and their pets wants to offer us all seamless hosted storage; there's no need for a glorified rsync service to be this creepy, evasive and intrusive.

> Otherwise you've lost your user.

I remain unconvinced that the various actions linked in the above were all required for a nifty install experience. Indeed, some of them are only required for forcing "features" on users that many have repeatedly indicated they don't want, after that all-singing, all-dancing install experience is over.

Which, turns out, is a great way to lose your user.

to be quite honest. I am happy they do these little hacks to improve the usability. If anything i find Apples lack of pushing OSX forward to be the real issue.

Not enough companies do this. User experience and ease of use is frankly one of the most important things (and this is coming from a developer).

I can't remember the amount of times I've gotten frustrated with (beautifully written) open source software, but with a horrible complex UI that takes hours to figure out how to use. Those are hours of my life I'm not getting back.

Why can't stuff just work?

Disclosure: I've actually made a fair penny taking open source projects (not adjusting anything) and slapping a nice UI on it, doing nothing more than that. Good UI and UX matters and people will pay for it.

Agree but if you want thing to work on appstore it become even worse. Thats why i pulled my app from the app store 6 months after lunch and instead are selling directly. Havent looked back since.

How was the revenue from the App Store for your app? How is it now in comparison? How do you market it?

The rev is the same. I was in top 10 on the app store for a good while it didn't do much to my sales so the benefits unless Apple decides to promote you for OSX are more or less null. At least in my experience.

I realized that for the kind of niche productivity software I made Google is a much better app store.

I mostly live of organic traffic and only do actual marketing once in a while. The best is when the product gets exposed to communities who are into productivity.

Out of curiosity, do you know if competitors (like Google Drive) are doing similar things like injecting code into Finder?

Not really. In the latest versions (maybe since Yosemite?), Apple has provided a Finde Extension API that has hooks for badges and right-click menus. That's what everyone's using.

I was hoping for an answer like yours. Thanks!

To be fair though: Dropbox is using that Extension API too for all the features it provides which basically is: Overlay icons and context menus.

They patch the Finder for all the additional features like their overlay toolbar and other little things, none of which I particularly like, but still - they are additional features lacking in Google Drive and friends.

As such I think it's not quite fair to say that Google Drive is much better for using the official API when it also doesn't provide additional features that are not supported by the official API.

Also remember that without DropBox and friends patching Finder in the past, we would likely never have gotten the API in the first place. Sometimes, in order to make a platform owner advance a platform, you have to work around their existing restrictions.

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