You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
The Dropbox desktop application will no longer be supported for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on October 22nd
Congratulations Dropbox! You've just put the nail in the coffin of all W7 users who prefer not to be spied on and constantly used for data scraping!
Well done. If the constant scaremonger naggi...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi Dibrom, thanks for messaging the Community.
We appreciate the feedback on this matter. As you've read in your email, Dropbox will be ending support for Windows versions 7, 8, and 8.1 on October 22, 2024.
We regularly release new versions of the Dropbox application with additional features, better performance, and security enhancements and these are not always compatible with older systems. Microsoft stopped providing security updates to Windows 8.1 in January, 2023, with Windows 7 and 8 being earlier than that date.
We are ending our support of the Dropbox app for these operating systems in October to keep our product offerings in-line.
Thanks for using Dropbox, and please let me know if there's anything else I can help with.
No problem Jay. There are plenty of free alternatives out there that do the same thing as Dropbox and more as well as offer greater storage space, so Dropbox shooting themselves in the foot is entirely your choice. I will just correct some of the misconceptions you're feeding though. I strongly suspect the 'additional features' to which you refer are actually better and more varied ways of data scraping your users, since that's always been what Windows 10 has been about, which of course is why it's always been free, whereas people had to pay for W7. If the product is 'free', then you are the product that's being sold is the adage.
'Security' has always been the default way to scaremonger users into 'upgrading' to more invasive malware ridden systems their purveyors want, to exploit user behaviour data to resell. The actual truth is the opposite. Windows 7 is by far and away the most secure version of Windows now there has ever been, by simple virtue of the fact that hackers no longer target it. They don't target it because as of June 2024, it's only used on 2.95% of all computers worldwide. XP is even better because it's market share is only 0.39% making it even more popular still than Windows 8 at 0.36%. I gave up bothering to even have an antivirus program installed many years ago. Simply don't need one anymore on Windows 7.
A perfectly valid analogy is a three pedal manual car. These days you could leave a 3 pedal manual car in the street with the keys in it, completely unlocked and it still wouldn't be stolen. Why? Because no car thieves these days have the faintest idea how to even drive a three pedal manual, so they literally couldn't drive it away even if they wanted to!
Crap excuses about security and added features are nothing but Trojan Horses, pure and simple. I'm sure you'll be able to scare a great many users into pointlessly upgrading and giving themselves and their data over to Microsoft to own them. I will simply dump Dropbox and use one of your many other competitors instead.
