Dropbox Apple Silicon (M1) install

[wwmiller3]

Hi,

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro 13" with the M1 processor and I cannot seem to get a native install of Dropbox for this chipset. From searching the community, it seems like M1 support should be available in the latest installer. However, trying that plus the latest beta build all ask me to install Rosetta during installation. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

Warren

[Wvp]

What bothers me most is that Dropbox is completely silent on this matter and they seem to handle it as a feature-request.

But to be honest I do not care too much about it anymore because I decided to discontinue using Dropbox. Dropbox has become to bloated for me and I can easily live with iCloud and/or OneDrive for now, I guess I'm just not the target-audience for Dropbox, which is fine.

[Michael B.10]

I am disappointed in the lack of communication but I would also say that it runs fine under Rosetta. I think there is a body of opinion who associate Rosetta with the PowerPC to Intel transition, and/or simply dislike the concept of translation. The actual experience for me on two M1 Macs is that I do not believe I could pass a blindfold test between Dropbox on Intel and Dropbox on Rosetta/M1.

[biketocamp]

Seriously Dropbox team. You have had over a year to compile a native arm64 version of Dropbox. Is this a signal that macos support is ending for the product? It sure feels like it. Time to move on I guess.

[Wvp]

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@Michael B.10 wrote:

I am disappointed in the lack of communication but I would also say that it runs fine under Rosetta. I think there is a body of opinion who associate Rosetta with the PowerPC to Intel transition, and/or simply dislike the concept of translation. The actual experience for me on two M1 Macs is that I do not believe I could pass a blindfold test between Dropbox on Intel and Dropbox on Rosetta/M1.

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I agree that Dropbox works without problems under Rosetta 2.

Rosetta 2 is provided by Apple as a transition tool, to give developers time to create universal applications, as Apple clearly states: "Rosetta is meant to ease the transition to Apple silicon, giving you time to create a universal binary for your app. It is not a substitute for creating a native version of your app."

At this moment many/ most developers have universal binaries or specific Apple Silicon versions for their apps. A company like Dropbox handling this as a feature request seems a bit strange to me, but we really do not know anything in that regard as Dropbox is (like Apple 😊 ) dead-silent on these matters until they are ready to release something.

[Doug T.]

My experience with Rosetta apps is that they normally work just fine, but with a noticable lag in input, chew up cpu and battery/ram as well.  A native experience is smoother and with less lag.

[jrwwallis]

What's really odd to me is that the dropbox installer is itself a universal binary, and runs fine as an Apple silicon binary:

But the resulting installed binary still runs in Intel mode:

I don't see the point in going to the trouble of creating a universal binary for the installer when the target app is still Intel mode only.

[UA_1]

fully agreed. it's awful to clone the processes 

[Doug T.]

most companies outsource for installers - so the installer is probably not actually done by dropbox.

[robmorgan]

This is starting to get on my nerves a bit. I've waited for roughly a year now for Dropbox to release native Apple Silicon versions of their apps. Additionally, all of the Dropbox processes combined are using over 1.2 GBs of memory on my M1 MacBook Air. This is very frustrating to have all of this bloatware installed on my machine promoting features and upgrades I'll never use. I only want a folder to sync a few files. It might be time to find an alternative after almost 15 years.  

[Rmac]

I’m looking for alternatives and might just upgrade my icloud account to more space. I have been with Dropbox a long time but do feel they don’t care about apple users (could be wrong but feel that way).