Recent Dropbox - Mac 12.3 Monterey support

[Nousmedis]

The official support page relating to Mac OS Monterey 12.3 Dropbox compatibility is 2 months old now, and Apple just released (April 2022) first beta version of 12.4 and patched 12.3 with 12.3.1, but still no references to current status other than "in late march we will release a beta version...". How can I know is the beta version is now secure or how many days, weeks or months (or years!) do we still need to wait for the final stable release of a 12.3 and up supported version of Dropbox?

[sphen]

yep Box had this working last october ('21) and onedrive earlier this year.  the lack of any communication is the worst part. at least give some transparency - otherwise we can only guess which is never good.

[LoveDemDawgs]

This is crippling to any artist who has relied on Dropbox for years. I have over 600 gigs of active working files. Am I honestly supposed to manually download them all, work with them and them copy them back to a platform that doesn't work? Also, why am I paying full price for a utility that no longer provides what it once did? 

Does anyone have a suggestion of where to move my files? I am going to cancel Dropbox.

[REK1]

We're in a similar boat, with upwards of 10TB on Dropbox. We're looking for alternative solutions. If it's not bad enough that Dropbox continues not to say anything, they also announced a price hike! That's just nuts.

[zaak]

Well, as a former software engineer, I know that good software engineers love a good challenge and hate being told that they can't figure something out. So our best bet may be to remind the core Dropbox engineers that they suck... because it's true... at least compared their competition... which is really the only thing to measure against.

The next step is to stop the engineers from shifting the blame to marketing or product management who they will claim is shifting their resources to new features and products that nobody needs.

Given the feedback that Dropbox competition has worked out "Smart Sync" just fine on Monterey, I've revised the responses from my post a few days back:

Why is Dropbox silent on this issue?

A. They don't care. They stopped working on it forever ago. But their competition has it, so they are still marketing it as a feature.

B. The engineers can't hack it. Marketing is too embarrassed to admit it.
Z. {fill in yer own answer}
D. Apple.

E.  "the pandemic"

I'm still leaning towards D, but B is a close second.

[CRD-CD415]

My latest email from customer support...I doubt they will reach back out to me when a solution is fixed. 

---------------

Thank you for reaching out to Dropbox Support. My name is @#$@! (I blanked his name out),  and I am more than happy to assist you. 
 
If I understand the issue you mentioned, you have contacted us on multiple occasions regarding the Dropbox desktop app issue which is causing some online-only files not to open correctly when you are using Mac OS 12.3.
 
Thank you for your patience in this matter. We can assure you that we are working on a resolution for this issue.
 
Please note that you can work around the issue if you make the file available offline by using the following steps:

• From Finder, you can simply double click on the file

OR

1. Right-click (or control-click) the file you wish to open.
2. Select Make available offline from the sub-menu.
3. You should now be able to open your file without issue from the application 

We will be sure to notify you with any further updates regarding this matter.
 
Regards,

@#$@! 

[zaak]

@CRD-CD415   that email looks familiar. And it also conveniently leaves out the part that there is no workaround for the fact that all the remote files show 0K in size.  Nor is there a workaround for the fact that Dropbox destroys the Modified Date all your folders/packages when you sync them local. And often doesn't refresh the online/offline icons until you manually refresh your Finder window.

Dropbox is showing a huge lack of professionalism on this subject.  Even the support article is off.  The article has "Monterey 12.3" in the title, and then goes immediately on to refer to 12.2.  Meanwhile, there's no reference to 12.4 which has been out for nearly 2 months. 

https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/macos-12-monterey-support

There's a lack of respect on this given plenty of us have emailed support on this issue.

For those of us that have 10+ years invested in Dropbox and 500 GB+... there is no good alternative than to suck it up.  Feels like someone at Dropbox is taking their support cues from Apple... as in silence/denial.  All we can do is watch and see how this backfires on them.  Would love to know what the "higher priorities" are over there that are sucking up the resources on fixing a core feature.

[paul20]

@zaak Help me understand your lean towards answer choice D.  How can Apple be the problem given that OneDrive and Box have had this working for months?

The only way I can reconcile that is to say that Dropbox is trying to have more features than OneDrive and Box, which I believe they are.  I know the OneDrive implementation has some serious limitations.  Does anyone know if this is true for the Box implementation as well?

[paul20]

What is the status of the Mac release here?  Has there been any progress on the 12.3+ support since the admission in February that it doesn't work?

[CRD-CD415]

Same **bleep** different day, still broken that I know of. I did notice this week that "transfer" was changed to "send" in my dropdown menu...but to my knowledge a solution to smart sync hasn't been fixed. 

[sphen]

yep - the transfer -> send change caused alot of confusion on the team as well - so glad they give good release notes and tell us when stuff changes! <sarcasm>... grr...