Hacker News Reader

Comment by shortformblog | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is terrible. As a critic of their slowness, I can now see why they dragged their feet on Apple Silicon for so long—the File Provider API really just trashes the experience.

In a world where Apple no longer allows for internal storage upgrades, the fact that you can only store your Dropbox on your main drive is just such a joke. This is the degradation of the experience by a thousand API changes.

I moved to SyncThing/local syncing in response to Dropbox’s moves last year, and I gotta say I am not regretting it one bit.

View on HN

I record audio at my studio into a dropbox folder on an external drive. I paid for a business plan (and the required 3 seats, only using one) so I could have unlimited storage.

This drive is always syncing to the cloud.

I go home (or travel) and can selectively sync specific projects, which still viewing the entire tree and keeping everything organized.

Neither internal drive is large enough to hold the files.

This workflow is so perfect Ive built my entire creative process around it. It’s completely broken by this change.

I’ve been a huge proponent of Dropbox and pay them over 1k a year as an individual just for this functionality.

As far as I can tell, there is no alternative.

The one thing that's kept me from SyncThing is the lack of iOS integration [1]. But the changes Apple has forced on Dropbox here is making me reconsider.

[1]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/102

Möbius Sync works well on iOS, I use it regularly.

This is what I use.

How has Apple forced them to do those changes? Apples APIs only allows it that way but Dropbox don’t have to use those APIs. There‘re other Cloud Sync clients that just work fine supporting all those features without using Apples APIs.

So Dropbox decided to switch to using Apples APIs knowing that it‘ll lack those features.

I switched from Syncthing, to Sync.com, and now finally to a combination of pCloud for archiving, and Syncthing for everyday files. I'm happy with this set up, and recommend it. EDIT: My motivation was wanting reliable end-to-end encryption.

The lack of iOS support isn't an issue for me either, since one of the reasons I avoided iPhones was precisely because I knew things like this would at some point be a blocker. 99% of the time, iPhones are fine, but that 1% of issues that Apple policy causes is dealbreakingly bad.

Dropbox provides other value. I started using their password manager, for example, and I am glad I don't have to pay for ANOTHER service for that.

Also, Dropbox has Vault - a more secure folder behind a pin that everyone with access to your screen can't just open. Very useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com