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Comment by lalos | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox's success depends on OS' file system representation. It's currently the perfect solution for the folder/file system but new systems like iOS and Android don't need a dropbox. I remember reading that Steve Jobs wanted to abstract out the folder/file representation for a simpler and easier to use iOS. They hide the files inside each app and it is all synchronized by iCloud. Dropbox clearly is aware of this paradigm shift and that's why they are pushing their new SDK and have a conference to promote Dropbox integration with any other apps.

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Dropbox also against to ALL the online/web services. All the web services are using non-file abstraction of data.

If all the apps go to cloud, Dropbox will be dead immediately. The problem is, that's actually happening now. So number of potential user of Dropbox is decreasing. Doesn't seem to be a long-term sustainable business if you believe web will conquer the world.

Also, Dropbox can't offer very high level user features, or platform specific features. It breaks symlinks, erases file permissions. Dropbox drops many kind of informations which can be essential to high-end users. Their speed and capacity is too low for high-volume data users - such as media works.

So Dropbox is losing potential users in both ends, and honestly, I don't know who will use Dropbox for what in future.

that sounds fine until you want to share data between applications as well as people.

Which is why it's not the case with Android. You can easily share files between applications.

Dropbox solves the problem well when you need to bridge between devices that have different ideas about how data should be organized. Files/folders is really the only abstraction that is universal and somewhat standardized.

The cucumbersome file system access(and lack thereof) on smartphones sucks big time and is part of a reason dropbox is so usefull. Just sync the folders across and good apps that let you save and open files will work.

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