Beta Build 148.3.4469

Well, I simply removed Dropbox from my Mac altogether. 

For the time being, I’ll keep the subscription (my personal one, and my company’s), and I’ll use https://cloudmounter.net/ to mount Dropbox as a virtual file system (which is slow but works), and will manually copy files. I do share files with my team via Dropbox but fortunately, it’s low-volume traffic — we typically update a few files a week there. We use Github for most work, and we’ve mostly used Dropbox to share larger files, with the convenience of quickly getting a public shareable link. 

But it looks to me that the new File Provider API-based Dropbox will be a disaster. Beta or not, I’m not talking about minor issues here — but the complete lack of usability. After having read all I could on this forum and in other places, Dropbox has also failed to adequately inform users about this change. There’s hardly any technical or in-depth information, just some platitudes. 

It looks to me that in the past few years, Dropbox has bloated their product palette with things I’ve never needed, but they failed to keep the quality of what I once thought was their core business (or used to be). The company had $2 billion in revenue and over $335 net income. Seems to be that they should have spent considerably more on developers to work on the Mac desktop integration — rather than publishing horrific beta versions long after Apple has released their macOS 12.3. I know Apple has been difficult, they don’t give developers enough notice in advance about the changes they will do in their OS — yet they’ve announced the move away from kernel extensions in 2019, that’s three years ago. 

I’ve asked my teammates to actively look for a different solution altogether, and I’ll be cancelling all our Dropbox subscriptions as soon as we’ve migrated the files to a new solution.