Dropbox doesn't support Apple Silicon and has no public plans to | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox doesn't support Apple Silicon and has no public plans to

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31 pointsapas20 comments

Dropbox has engineering issues in general.

Linux support is terrible, their app still doesn't support sync on demand and probably never will. The net effect of this is that people with a lot of data in their dropboxes (i.e. paying customers) get to choose between either losing huge amounts of drive space unnecessarily or just not syncing that folder at all.

One has to wonder if the reason they're not supporting Apple Silicon is a lack of technical ability rather than just a brain-dead organizational decision.

After the horrendous recent Google Drive update I decided to give Dropbox a try for the first time in 8+ years, and the software quality has truly taken a decline.

I’m considering switching to iCloud Drive at this point but I’m not a huge fan of how it works either. Any alternatives I should be aware of?

Microsoft said in a blog post that they’re working on Apple Silicon support (i don’t know if they already released it) and much better integration with the finder. Articles look really promising.

Just tried all the big major cloud drive apps, and OneDrive was surprisingly much better than both Google Drive, Dropbox and even iCloud Drive on MacOS and iOS. Thoroughly impressed - thanks, I had not considered Microsoft.

I use syncthing with a digital ocean droplet. Never experience any issues.

Storage is significantly more expensive on DO, no? Granted, the pros likely outweigh the cons.

Probably. I didn't check. I don't store multiple tens gigabytes of data so it's very cheap anyway.

Have you given a look into Nextcloud?

I've been running it on my own server and been having a great time with it. I haven't done any massive file syncs or anything. But been syncing Joplin, recipes and documents without issues with it.

Use https://rclone.org/

Looking for a Dropbox alternative? We were M1 native at launch (https://www.Sync.com).

question about your support levels. for a solo basic account, do you really not offer a your-business-hours chat support function?

We offer high speed email support at that level. It's in-house and fast.

Thanks. I’ve been a Crashplan customer for eons and the last two restores I’ve done from code42 went sideways. So looking for a reasonable alternate.

How good is Rosetta 2 in practice?

That was my first question. Is the dropbox app doing that much in terms of heavy lifting?

When it works it's fine. But I'm getting bug reports that users have to install or update it manually to run x86 binaries, which is terrible UX for anything that isn't a developer tool.

Don't take this comment as gospel though, I have not had time or resources to investigate what was going on.

When I first got my M1 MacBook Air I was still a DropBox paid customer. But when the app started using over half a gigabyte of memory, I took more and more stuff out of it and started putting it on iCloud. I've cancelled my subscription and now have less than my grandfathered free space occupied, with no syncing going on.

I have very few apps that require Rosetta 2. In my experience, it works great, but I can no longer imagine having an app that requires Rosetta running constantly in the background. My MBA is only 8GB, and while that is rarely a problem for me, I can't afford to just fritter it away.

Another important question: how long does Apple plan to support/maintain it?

Apple typically supports the prior architecture via emulation for at least 5 years after they cease sales of that architecture.

It’s very solid in my experience but does have a memory and performance hit. For something like Dropbox which is running constantly in the background that’s not great.

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