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Comment by caruber | Hacker News Reader

The real strength of Dropbox comes from the ecosystem of apps that use dropbox to store data. It is hard for newcomers to challenge that network effect. But competitors like Tonido are doing interesting stuff by focusing on the security, privacy and the private aspects of owning your own cloud. If they are able to change the narrative from utility to trust and security then newcomers have a fighting chance.

Finally it comes to what wins the customers: Trust or Utility or the Balanced of Both.

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Which apps are using Dropbox to store data?

caruber answered your question, but for some reason the answer is dead.

ASFAIK 1Password, GoodReader, BoxyTunes, QuickOffice and tons of file managers in Android

Tons of mobile apps do this. 1password is probably the best example, but just the other day I decided I wanted to be able to view a Sketchup file on my phone and the app I found ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sightspace-free-d/id56721967... ) had the option to load files from Dropbox.

I have it in several of my apps, Lister 2 and Ez Budget. It's fantastic for syncing over multiple devices.

My comic book reader uses Dropbox to sync, my todo program uses Dropbox to read my todo.txt, I use Dropsync to do 2-way syncing between a directory on my phone and my computers mainly so I can drop reciepts + other PDFs into a directory on my computer and get them from my phone, tablet or other PCs.

I could go and replace all of these with another tool, but I would have to have a compelling reason to do so and would probably have to find some new apps (or the apps I use would have to integrate a new service)

Out of curiosity, how many new apps use the Dropbox API, or the new Data Storage API? I haven't heard much on that front.

I have no idea how many use it, but I've implemented it in one of my apps and it is pretty fantastic. I plan to use it in more in the future.

let us know if we can help!

Does it work offline at all? I took a brief look at the API, and it seemed like any time you wanted to make a change to the data it needed to talk to the server.

It makes the changes locally, and then syncs when you get a connection later.

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