Dropbox Passwords discontinuation
help.dropbox.com
help.dropbox.com
It absolutely drives me nuts that the western world is moving to "as seen in China" login-via-callback flow. Aside from the privacy issue of forcing people to attach an email or phone number or third-party auth provider to their every account, it's just a waste of time and energy to delete our passwords and force us through this weird multi-app flow just to log in to a service we spent years logging into without ever getting hacked. Imagine if every time you wanted to get into your house you had to press the doorbell and then wait for someone to call you back to decide whether you should be allowed in. It's absurd.
And yes, I understand the major conflict of interest in saving important passwords to Google, which I personally don't do and wouldn't recommend, but I think if they're interested in staying out of the Googleverse, we can also tell people about the good paid alternatives out there.
Because there are vested interests in doing the latter. That said, I don't trust password managers either.
This is exactly what I do to visitors to my house.
Passkeys are a great Trojan horse for password managers vs oauth, magic links, "password123" strings
What, exactly, does this mean?
But passkeys are the new hotness, not SSO, and what you’re describing is SSO. Passkeys aren’t tied to an outside account, just a password manager (which can be your browser - no account required).
Many sites have "magic links" (they sent you a link to login via email instead of having to write a in password), but there's almost always a way to say you want to log in with your password. Sometimes, especially for touchier things, there's MFA.
> Aside from the privacy issue of forcing people to attach an email or phone number or third-party auth provider to their every account
How do you login without an email, phone number or delegating to a third party? You perform a secret magic dance? Especially for something such as booking.com which more likely than not has your bank details saved, and can wreak havoc (cancel your bookings), I'm really not sure what you want them to do.
The thing that makes it particularly egregious is that Booking.com is literally designed to be used on the road, from any location anywhere, on any weird device you might have access to at the time. There's no guarantee that whatever janky airport wifi allows IMAP, or that your phone can receive SMS in whatever country you're in. Forcing 2FA - or now apparently just the "1FA" of magic link/OTP - has made the service useless for its primary purpose.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Bookingcom/comments/1hl055b/cannot_...
Bold of you to even assume the current generation of a 'decision makers' do know what IMAP is.
Mainly due to conflict resolution, corruption and version history. It still has best implemented “online only files”.
Think 10 person design studio all working in one big studio “Work” folder.
So while the clients got bloated Dropbox still has edge in essentials. People trust it unlike other services some of which are straight up infamous for loosing your files like iCloud or corrupting them like adobe creative cloud.
On the Mac, I avoid their own client and use Maestral for pretty much the same reasons. Unlike their old client, their Mac client annoys you with all kinds of (to me) irrelevant stuff. Only on Linux I use their client, because it's still the old client and does not bother me.
I guess a lot of people that are still using and paying for Dropbox, do it because of their really excellent file sync and try to tune out of anything else because they tried to push too much crap over the years (remember when they tried to push everyone to use their mail client?).
I would rather have them bring things like end-to-end encryption to all account types. Improve the functionality of the core product we are paying them for.
Is it really that expensive for them to maintain minimal access for a year? This is not a rhetorical question.
Always with the product-line creep. No doubt the next offerings will be Dropbox Email and "Dropbox the LLM" (better than Spaceballs the Flamethrower, I suppose).
Like. Build a decent product. The lack of any major competition doesn't mean they should stop improving and branch out into costly absurdity, at least try to keep up with Maestral with 100x the headcount.
Man, wouldn’t it be so cool if tech companies actually were competitive instead of trying to establish parasitic marketshare or dying with no in-between?
Taildrop needs improvement with files over a gig and between other users though.
Everything I've looked at lacks a native client for at least one of my devices or has privacy concerns. Proton would be my first choice if they offered a Linux client.
The other route I need to explore is rclone - it claims to connect to everything. It would need to poll / cronjob to update rather than instant updates like the mainstream options. The downside is uncertainty - if Proton or whatever changes their private API or encryption scheme then things will cease to sync.
How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?
Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.
> The lack of any major competition
Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.
(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the software.
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the cost, and is looking for alternatives, but the marginally-better software keeps them there for now (gdrive and onedrive have a fair number more issues).
Yes, I think it matters. But they exploded their headcount and now they have to compete in areas they aren't anywhere near as good in (document management, etc) to make the higher profit they need to keep going, and raise the cost for everyone who doesn't use it.
Basically they went B2B and have been coasting in a gradual decline on their consumer side. A tale as old as time.
If they offered a competitive 100 Gig tier or a cheaper 1 TB tier I'd instantly switch my entire family back from Google Drive because at a technical level Dropbox is just simply better. Insync + GDrive is much worse than the block based sync. If they just focused on this they have a good business. The headcount expansion and desperate horizontal creep into other services just makes miserable products.
How many other options are they to sync files between my laptop and my phone, especially if my Laptop is running Linux?
Been there, done that: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...
As a long standing (paying) user of Dropbox (I believe I've been using it since the very beginning), and former stock holder, I believe Dropbox must adjust its course asap. They lack a clear vision for the future and their current offering is way too limited (and shrinking apparently). For the money they ask there's no point in actually paying for their product, unless one is already locked in. For the same price, or even less, one can get an entire Office suite (Google/MS), plus cloud storage. Sure, Google Drive or OneDrive are nowhere close to Dropbox in terms of sync quality, but how many users (business and consumers) are willing to pay such a premium for quality file sync on top of other subscriptions?
Additionally, for many Dropbox is a no go for the simple fact that they don't have a reliable way to edit documents simultaneously. Recently I was looking for a cloud storage solution for a business that needed collaborative editing of documents. I had to go with Office365, as much as I would have preferred not to, because the way they allow multiple concurrent edits to documents is simply not matched by Dropbox (Google Drive is even better but it lacked some features that were essential for the business).
Unfortunately it looks like the stock market is well aware of this. The capitalization of Dropbox has been essentially stagnating for ~5 years, if adjusted for inflation.
I really hope that Dropbox can change its course by doing some brave acquisitions and rebuild its brand image with a more compelling and comprehensive offering.
Is this really a differentiator nowadays?
If platforms can provide a competing service, bundled within their package, many will pick it, even if it is worse quality. Dropbox had to expand (like Proton are - they started with email, then added calendar, Drive for file storage, Docs for collaborative editing, Pass for password manager, etc. Even if I would prefer they spend more time to fix gaps in their Android email app, I completely understand why they have to expand their stack).
some might even call this anti-competitive practice!