Apple Vision Pro Support with Dropbox.

I am pleased to see the Dropbox product team requesting comments regarding Dropbox on visionOS. But I am also surprised that you are asking why and how we might use Dropbox on Apple Vision Pro as the fundamental purpose of Dropbox is access to important files from any computer one may be using. 

In my case, Dropbox is offsite file storage where we keep all essential family records ranging from tax records to pdf documents such as house system/appliance manuals and settings records to spread sheets of important data to travel documents, insurance documents, basically anything computer readable. As a photographer I keep archival files of about 100,000 photographs that I can reach from anywhere in the world when an unanticipated request comes in from a customer or other requester. I can then move it into Lightroom (which works beautifully on AVP)  for any special processing required. 

I use AVP in a variety of ways and am learning its quite extraordinary capabilities. Even while in the AVP space for entertainment or ordinary web activity, I have found in the last couple of weeks a need to access files of each of the types I listed in the previous paragraph. It is possible but cumbersome to access Dropbox files through the web browser. 

In many ways my use of AVP is like that of a vastly improved iPad. So it is very surprising and disconcerting to find that access to Dropbox through the Files app mechanism is not available on VisionOS as it is on an iPad.

As a developer Dropbox needed to explicitly disable its iPad app from availability for VisionOS in compatibility mode. I imagine this might be due to some system level issues of access via the Files app that may have required some attention. But given Apple’s intention to have iPad apps work by default, this cannot be a heavy lift for Dropbox.

I am not particularly asking for some fancy immersive capability for Dropbox on VisionOS. Just that you do what you have to do to make the basic capabilities of Dropbox on iPadOS available on VisionOS. Apple evidently believes this to be a reasonable expectation, as it is explicitly mentioned in the Apple Vision Pro User Guide regarding the Files app:

”You can use the Files app  to access files stored on file servers and other cloud storage providers, like Box and Dropbox.”