HTC’s Answer To iCloud: A New Deal With Dropbox

Dropbox can do what icloud does. Make one folder per app and hide file extensions in your os.

I think the two services are very alike, the only real difference in which platforms are supported with full sync. Dropbox chooses desktops, icloud anything apple.

I think you might be a little. I may be overestimating the average user, but I believe iCloud over-abstracts the filesystem. A normal office worker has a ton of files already. It may be messy, but the world at large at least have some sort of workflow they carved out over the years of using the typical user facing filesystem. I can't imagine most people know how to get these files onto their iOS devices using iCloud. My iOS addicted family certainly doesn't. I honestly don't even really get it. If properly presented by HTC/Dropbox/Android, it is a superior solution.

Rather that trying to figure out what the user wants and often frustrating them with invisible restrictions, a Dropbox solution just powerfully augments what the normal person already does on a computer. Put all of your stuff here. Press on your file, you get presented with a series of apps that can work with your stuff. And when you are done, put it back in the box that magically keeps all of your stuff. And the stuff in this box will work with any application that can parse that particular file on your phone/tablet/laptop/work computer, not just on a certain subset of apps on a certain subset of devices.

Just because our file management paradigm is 20+ years old, is it so bad?

When you have a "lot of crap", you want some sort of organization to it. Folders do this well; gmail-esque labels arguably better.

I can't see how you can get away with "hiding files" themselves. In the end, a file can have multiple applications handle it (view, edit, etc.).. somewhere the files need to be visible.

On another note, Dropbox offers plenty more features. It is among the easiest ways to share files with another. And it runs on almost every platform; I can't even comment much on iCloud as I lack OS/X or an iOS device.

google has ceded the lead here because files suck. users don't want files or filesystems. look to how iOS works for how most users want to access their files: they open an app and the documents that are relevant to that app are available to them. whether that data is stored in a filesystem or in a database, locally or remotely is totally irrelevant. google docs works like this. picasaweb (or g+ photos now i guess) works like this. google music works like this. the very nature of dropbox is to not be the ideal solution to the problem they are solving. they're the realist's solution, google is going for the idealist's solution.

imho, google is leading the market here by not being a part of it.

Honestly I suspect Google is trying to grow a third party ecosystem.

By that I mean they leave obvious problems half solved or unsolved so that someone else can come along and do a really good job of it.

Cyanogen, GetJar, Dropbox, Opera, alt home screens, etc. By doing a 40% job Google leaves easy victories for third parties.

I expect the 'end game' is a better OS with a healthy ecosystem and is not dependent on Google.

Remember Google got into mobile to protect their ad market. A healthy competitive OS ecosystem would do this all without massive long-term engineering effort. Why build an OS and ecosystem if all you have to build is the OS?

> But the lack of a comprehensive solution for photo synchronization is telling as well.

If you turn on Google+ Instant Upload, you get very good photo synchronization support, especially for Android. Photos are synced to Google+ in the background, and since that is backed by Picasa, they automatically show up in the Galleries of any other Android device you have. I've been impressed with how quickly and easily you can browse your uploaded photos on another device.

It isn't for everyone because Google+ limits the maximum resolution of Instant Upload photos, but it is for a lot of people because they give you "unlimited storage" in exchange.

Google has nothing to do with this topic, but for what it is worth Android syncs all (if not almost all) Google related data from Android devices.

If you have a Picasa account Android comes with a sync adapter which seamlessly syncs photos to all your Android devices and PC's with Picasa.

What advantage does iCloud have over this for photos?

Android also syncs Google docs, browser/Chrome data, contacts, calendar... The only thing I can think of that Google doesn't sync (yet) is files.

I recently saw Android's voice recognition -- a feature that long preceded Siri -- described as the "Android's response to Siri". These headlines seldom have much basis in fact.

However I would point to two things on the Android side--

a) Preceding iCloud, again, has been a pervasive cloud-based backup system, including a third-party API - http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html I won't argue that it's the same thing, because it isn't, but it does provide the highest value functionality.

b) But you're not supposed to rely upon that anyways. As another poster mentioned, most of what you do in Android is already cloud based. Whether it's Google docs, or automatic uploads to Google+ or Flickr, etc.

All I see is that users get a Dropbox app pre-installed, with 25GB of storage.

iCloud gives the user transparent storage of data, apps can use the same APIs on all iOS devices (where is the Android Dropbox API?) to store information there. Backups occur to it trivially. Photos are automatically synced there. iTunes Match runs off it.

iTunes Match only takes up 2GB of storage for my 15,000 songs (~80GB), because the majority are in the iTunes music store, so this deal would already be worse for me.

iCloud wins because it is backed by the ecosystem. Where is the corresponding ecosystem in the Android world?

How does a bundled Dropbox app + storage bundle compete if it requires the user to manually do file management to ensure "cloud syncing" happens?

6 months ago I would have agreed but Apple has surpassed Android in this respect. With iOS you get for free:

* Calendars, contacts, notes, reminders, bookmarks, reading list, etc.

* Full device back-up (including all third party applications, settings, etc)

* iCloud Documents / native APIs

* PhotoStream (photo syncing between devices)

For a price:

* iTunes Match

It's amazing how quickly things change.

Dropbox on Android is pretty pathetic. It doesn't actually do sync - you get a file browser not too much different than the dropbox web site interface, and can download files one at a time! You can also choose to upload files although you can't select an entire directory at once. This is closer to a crappy ftp client than the desktop sync solution everyone is familiar with. They did however recently just add auto upload of photos and videos.

It should be noted that Dropbox on iOS is even worse (same download one file at a time mechanism) since you can only upload photos and videos, rather than any arbitrary content. Every iOS app that wants Dropbox integration has to add its own code to do all of it. On Android there is a centralized accounts system where Dropbox, Skype, Linkedin, Facebook and any other app with relevant permissions can publish an account. Other apps can then access those accounts (without getting the username/password - just a token) so they don't require heavyweight integration.

Android doesn't do calendar and contacts like Apple does. There can be multiple providers and they can each do whatever they want. For example Google stores those in the cloud, as does Linked and Skype so there is nothing to do to have them in sync. You can see the union of all relevant providers at once.

BTW one huge advantage Android has over iOS is that you do not have to keep re-entering passwords all the time. It totally bewilders me that iOS users aren't up in arms at how often you have to keep entering it.