The Dropbox desktop application will no longer be supported for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on October 22nd

Apparently I am NOT the Lone Ranger who intends to continue running Win 7 despite Dropbox's unfortunate decision to discontinue support soon. It makes no sense to let "the tail wag the dog" by upgrading (?) away from Win 7 to continue using Dropbox. Those folks could help the community by publishing a list of free alternatives that will continue to be supported for Win 7 users who refuse to switch OSes for only one app. Do y'all hear me OK ??

Very Bewildered Bob

Doubtful, because the very nature of the software's purpose is that it connects to the internet and 'phone's home' all the time in order to do the very thing the tin it comes in says it can do. This means it is constantly checking for and updating itself without user control. There used to be a stripped out version called Dropbox portable, which could even run from USB on computers that were locked down from installing apps like work computers, but Dropbox put an end to that when they decided they would remove the option of preventing updates and took away all user control altogether.

Just google "how do I prevent Dropbox from updating" and you'll see this is a VERY common and wanted question. The answer unfortunately is you can't - at least not without breaking the application entirely such that it no longer works. In this respect, it's the same as Windows 10/11 itself. You can strip all the spyware and telemetry out of Windows 7 relatively easily and make a new installer without all the spyware/bloatware crap, and it works brilliantly - far better in fact than it ever did officially from Microsoft, but you can't do the same thing with Windows 10/11. The telemetry/spyware/data scraping tools are so intrinsic and embedded so deeply within the operating structure of Windows 10/11, that removing them breaks the OS to such an extent that it no longer works as an OS. Exactly the same is true of Dropbox now unfortunately. These are both advertising tools designed to harvest your data and sell it to advertisers ultimately to make money.

Windows 10/11's primary purpose is a data scraping tool for Microsoft. On the back of that basic functionality is an operating system for your MSI/Gigabyte/ASUS whatever MoBo provided as the useful part you need to run your computer as the incentive for installing it, but never forget that the primary purpose and the main reason for the software existing in the first place is to scrape the user's data and feed it back to Microsoft.

As of today, right now (since I just checked), the sum total market share of Windows versions 7 + 8 + 8.1 is only 3.71%. That's how many computers in the world are running those OSes. The simply truth is that Dropbox have made a commercial decision to trash 3.71% of their customers they've determined they can live without and don't need. They can see the numbers for themselves and that's a decision they've made. 3.71% is not a lot and they can obviously survive with a loss of 3.71% of their customer base, so that's what they've decided to do. No amount of pleading or hand wringing will change that. Just switch to their competitors instead. A quick look reveals there are a lot of them.