Dropbox unstable in iPad OS Files App.

[VinceM50]

The problem I have is that Dropbox seems to crash when running on an iPAD via the apple files app. If I open an application that uses the files app, such as Pages or Final Draft, when saving to the Dropbox via the files app, it crashes the app and for the next 4 to 5 minutes if I click on drop box via the files app it just doesn’t load.

Apple has confirmed this is a Dropbox issue (I raised it with them first), and I have not been able to crash the application(s) using Google Drive via files in the same way. 

Can anyone help?

[VinceM50]

Thank you for summing this up. I don't know how many times the same thing can be tried over and over.

[Dragon Personal Management]

Thanks Vince in a previous life working I used to work in IT security Let me tell you in a none of it surprises me. The amount of bugs in modern software, including Apple by the way is astounding. Things are just chucked out these days, irrespective of loads of bugs and they don’t seem to care too much about them!!! and this problem is so easy to reproduce the people of dropbox and Apple must be well aware of it and given five minutes with an iPad or iPhone with dropbox on it. You can reproduce this problem if you were an IT support person 🙂

[flaviomuff]

totally agree. it‘s a chicken or egg problem.

i am in contact with an engineer from apple. trying to capture the issue when it happens so they can check the logfiles for those timestamps.

keep u posted. 

f.

[Simonmr]

I had this problem arise again today. When working on a Pages filed stored in Dropbox on my iPad, the Pages app crashed and the Files app became unresponsive. I reported this back to Megan who had previously helped on this forum using my previous ticket number and got a reply from someone else telling me how to log out of Dropbox if I wanted to do so.

[Dragon Personal Management]

This problem occurs every day for me. I am now so used to it that I have a button on my iPad which I click on the screen which automatically reboots the iPad. This always solves the problem. This points to - I believe….as I said in previous posts there’s something running in the background that falls over and  dropbox fails -this cab  always be checked by attempting to use dropbox THROUGH the Files app. You will find when you click on it nothing happens. However if you use the native Dropbox app you can see and use the files…. it affects any app using dropbox VIA the files app. So for example, the last time I was trying to open a iOS pages file using recents, the file which was stored in dropbox would not open just spinning circle yet soon as I have rebooted everything works perfectly again and this is always the case on whatever device I’m using I have 4  different iPads and phones all are the same. Reboot always resolves the problem. However, this is not a solution Apple and dropbox need to talk to each other. I continue to wait for that momentous event… I won’t hold my breath 😉

[superuser]

Thanks, very well summarized! I can confirm it too.

This bug has been there for (at least) over a year now and no update of ipados nor Dropbox ever changed anything! 

[Dragon Personal Management]

Good point and In fact I raised this after prob 6-10 months of struggling so I reckon this issue has existed for 2 years and they def know it exists you can easily reproduce it just use DB on any IOS device and it will show within a matter of 20 mins if you are using it regularly - I thought it was just me at first as Google of issue did not throw up much….but looks like anyone that uses DB and any app that access DB via IOS Files will face the issue.  

[drabtz]

Having the same problem daily, the only solution is going to configuration, searching for the dropbox app and changing the language. Its very frustrating 

[Walter]

Hey @drabtz, could you elaborate a bit more on the issue you're facing and provide some additional information such as your device's exact OS version, the version of the mobile app installed there etc.? 

[vmkirin]

I also have this issue. I am trying to use Pages on my iPad 10 and it constantly crashes or loses work. I lost 1500 words one day while writing an essay. I can’t restart my iPad every 10min — that’s not a useful solution. I’ve reinstalled Dropbox already. Not sure what else to do, but I admit this is a highly disappointing issue.