Dropbox support for macOS 12.3

We just finished switching our entire creative department of over 100 people to Dropbox from OneDrive for Business. (You can read about the experience here: Dropbox vs OneDrive .) But after fighting to make this change you can imagine how embarrassed I am that Dropbox has not yet made Smart Sync fully compatible in Monterey.

Not completely sure, but the new Monterey API for cloud usage has been available since Catalina, and Apples has said trillions of times that kernel extensions will be discontinued. They first warning. Then made an end-date. At least one year ago. 

I wonder what are doing Drobox developers if they aren't implementing this. Dropbox is a mature and stable technology in most platforms. This forces me to think they don't have any Senior dev and aren't able to do anything.

They (as most billion-level companies) have sold their soul to investors instead of customers. I think the only solution to this is find a strong Dropbox investor, explain him the problem and perhaps he will be able to slap-in-the face and force them to be proactive instead of post-active, because when a company reaches some Stocks level, final users are ants for that company. They only see global numbers and global earnings, but they aren't able to take in account that, once a "drop" of users start leaving the platform, it could become a cascade of users and one day they will discover that the company is an empty shell giving "cancamusas" to their investors. 

Sorry to be so impolite, but each time some Operative System does big internal changes, Dropbox is the last company to update. Always. 

Dropbox has had over a year to get with the program, yet still drags its feet.  This isn't some tiny mom and pop software outfit with a few thousand users...it's a multinational corporation valued at over $8 billion. Not million, BILLION.  How can they possibly have any excuses left at this point?

You say we are whinging, but where I come from, we have a saying: the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  It is absolutely unacceptable to pay 10s of thousands of dollars, every year, for software that does not work as advertised!  Now is not the time for making excuses.  Nor is it time for Dropbox to "put their hand up." 

They need to FIX the software and get it current, NOW.  We (and many others I'm sure) are sick of the delays and broken implementation.  We are looking elsewhere.  Some of us have already dropped the service entirely.  The longer this goes on, the more incentive there is for the rest of us to move on and leave Dropbox in the rear view.  If Sharepoint wasn't such a nightmare we'd be gone already.

thelwang It is possible and I think not so hard, because OneDrive support this since 12.3 release. So it's not Apples fault but Dropbox incompetence.

When can we expect a dropbox fix for 12.3 and onwards (latest 12.4). 

There was promised a solution and so far nothing has happened.... clients are not happy about this, and pushing on with sharepoint/onedrive as a replacement option

yes, we are having the same issue for months w/o any ETA from Dropbox. it would force us to use a competitor as this is not a good workflow.

I think Smart Sync might just be going away in the future and it's mostly Apple's fault

I noticed that Dropbox has removed any mention of "Smart Sync" and "Automatic Space Saving" from the plan comparison page here:  https://www.dropbox.com/plans

You can see on the Way Back Machine that in January of 2022 Smart Sync was still touted as a feature for paid plans: https://web.archive.org/web/20220102172813/https://www.dropbox.com/plans


Compare Jan 2022

vs now, May 2022

Reading between the lines, I suspect the "Smart" part of "Smart Sync" is going away.  My guess is Smart Sync is just going to become "dumb sync" and require you to go to a file/folder in Finder and click "make online-only" or "make available offline".  Basically just selective sync with more control and visibility.  It might get smarter in the future, but that depends on Apple making the right APIs available. Given Apple's competition with Dropbox (iCloud Drive), they probably don't have too much incentive.

Honestly, I blame Apple for this.  Smart Sync worked great until Apple banned kernel extensions.  Sure Apple announced kexts were going away 2 years ago, but it's been 2 years and Apple still hasn't offered a suitable replacement.  I might be wrong, but I believe the old Smart Sync behavior is impossible to re-create with the FileProvider APIs Apple offers. So this really is at least 50% Apple's fault.  

(Apple's iCloud Drive has the same limitation as Dropbox's "Smart" Sync does on Monterey 12.3.  You must use Finder or a File Picker to make a cloud hosted file available locally before any other program can access it.)

Well, this all makes it very easy. My dropbox account renews in a week. I'm moving it all over to OneDrive. 12.3 has been out for well over a month and this lack of support is UNACCEPTABLE for a product that I am paying for.

OneDrive on Monterey is an absolute train wreck too.  They did fully transition to the FileProvider API, unlike Dropbox, but it comes with tons of downsides and their users are rebelling.  Read the comments on these OneDrive posts: 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/inside-the-new-files-on-demand-experience-on-macos/ba-p/3058922

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/updates-to-files-on-demand-on-macos/bc-p/3253983/highlight/true#M2940

(the actual posts are great though because they explaining in more detail the technical changes and challenges that Dropbox must deal with too)

Based on OneDrive's experience, it sounds like Apple's FileProvider API is in no way ready to replace Dropbox's old behavior without other huge downsides.  If you try out the Dropbox Beta, you can see what Dropbox's FileProvider implementation is like, but it sounds far worse and I wouldn't recommend anyone try it.  Unfortunately Apple has backed both companies into a corner and there's not much they can do but hope Apple improves the FileProvider API in future updates.