We didn't use swift in our app development for iOS devices. To use API v2 in iOS platform, we need an objective-C version!!! Please kindly provide an objective-C version!

@Steve, my team and I make the Workflow app and we disappointed in your decision to write the Dropbox v2 SDK in Swift. We are not able to adopt Swift yet because: - Including Swift code in an app causes the entire Swift runtime to be included in the app, which substantially increases the size of the app, the amount of time it takes for the user to download it, and the amount of space it takes on the user's phone. - Additionally, the Swift programming language is still rapidly evolving, and Swift code you write today may not compile tomorrow. This makes Swift a bad choice for large codebases like ours. - New versions of Swift are tied to new versions of Xcode and iOS. When iOS 10 enters beta, it will come alongside a new version of Swift that will not compile with the production, shipping version of Xcode (which you must use to submit apps to the App Store). Therefore we'd have to fork our codebase between the two versions of Swift. For the reasons I outlined above, we will not be able to adopt Swift until the language is more stable and the runtime is included in iOS. This means that even if you add Objective-C support to the framework, we will not be able to use it and will have to write our own version of the SDK from scratch. This has not been a problem with other SDKs, as it is standard practice for vendors to write their SDKs in Objective-C. Most major iOS apps (and indeed, the iOS frameworks and apps themselves) are still written in Objective-C and I believe you are making a sizable mistake by writing the new Dropbox SDK in Swift, let alone not including Objective-C compatibility. A lot of developers will be unable to use this SDK. The correct way of doing this would be to distribute an Objective-C SDK that works with both Objective-C and Swift apps, and perhaps an additional Swift wrapper if you want to provide a more Swift-native interface.

This decision is insane. Is there any technical justification you can give me that will allow me to convince my PM that our team now has to learn another programming language to use your API? Box, S3, GDrive, OneDrive and iCloud all have Objective-C apis available. Do you really feel that you'll be able to compete for IOS developer mindshare with just a Swift-based API? I strongly urge you to reconsider.

@Steve, thanks for providing the additional information and for your transparency. I'll just quickly reiterate that for us (and for many other iOS developers), including any Swift code in our app is not an option at this point in time. Your decision to not write the SDK itself in Objective-C on the grounds that "the experience of using an Objective-C library from Swift is not great" doesn't seem logical to me, because the converse (not being able to use Swift code in Objective-C) is a far more severe problem. Also keep in mind that all of Apple's iOS system frameworks are written in Objective-C, and Swift developers are more than capable of using them. Apple has made some great additions to Objective-C recently (nullability, generics) specifically to improve this type of interoperability. If I were in your shoes, I would invest your time into re-working the new SDK to be written solely in Objective-C, and perhaps distribute a nice Swift wrapper with fancy enums if that is something that developers are interested in. Maintaining 2 separate SDKs does not seem like a good choice. The majority of iOS apps today are written in Objective-C, not Swift. Your goal as an SDK vendor should be to ensure that your SDK is usable by the most number of developers, and potentially excluding more than half of your audience due to a programming language choice is a poor decision.

Agreed. Most iOS apps are still being written in Objective-C. We really need an Obj-C version of the API.

Another long time iOS developer here with a huge codebase and quite a few clients with running apps that require maintenance, and no plans to be switching to Swift anytime soon. It's all nice that we have these hipsters jumping on the Swift bandwagon as soon as it came along (it's from Apple so it should be the next great thing right?), but stability issues in Xcode at first and language changes along the road makes you think twice about switching all your Objective C code to Swift, unless you do this as a hobby and not write iOS apps for a living. There is a huge amount of code out there that is written in Objective C. Using Objective C from Swift is a lot easier than the inverse (which might be impossible in some cases as you have shown yourself), and there are a lot of apps out there (you will know better than me) that already integrate with Dropbox. You can't possibly expect all those developers to switch languages or include the Swift runtime + all the problems when trying to get the thing to compile if they want to maintain their app and integrate SDK V2? I think there has been a wrong decision at Dropbox: since you guys started a new SDK from scratch anyway it would make sense to just use the latest and "greatest" tech to write it in. I am currently writing an SDK myself for one of my clients, and doing it in Objective C for the reasons mentioned by my colleagues in the previous posts. Let's talk Android: would it make sense to build an Android SDK which would only work on Android 6.0 today? For me it is a similar story with iOS.

To use API v2 in iOS platform, we need an objective-C version

Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
9 years ago
Hi TK, we have an overview of what's new in API v2 in the blog post here:

https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2015/11/dropbox-api-v2-launches-today/
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
9 years ago
Raheel, no updates on that.
Joris M.
New member | Level 2
9 years ago
"That unfortunately means it will take us longer than we intended to offer it." -> Does that mean that we will get an Obj.C API at some point?
TK K.
New member | Level 1
9 years ago
FWIW after looking I don't really need anything in v2 that badly - I do my own sync and fileid tracking using the rev field and found it pretty easy to integrate...

It might be nice to just see a point release that adds oauth2 to v1...
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
9 years ago
C. Tim, thanks for the feedback. I'll send this along as a request, but I can't make any promises. Just to clarify a bit though, the Sync SDK itself it built on the Core API and so should continue working, but it's no longer officially supported. The full details are in the blog post.

Joris, yes, we do intend on offering a solution for using API v2 from Objective-C. (And for reference, it is already possible to call the API v2 HTTPS endpoints directly if you want.)

TK, API v1 itself does already support OAuth 2 in addition to OAuth 1. I imagine you're talking about support for OAuth 2 in the SDK though, so I'll send this along as a feature request for that.
Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
9 years ago
C. Tim, I can't make any promises, but I'm sending this along as a request to make it open source.
philippe l.9
New member | Level 1
9 years ago
Very sad to read this thread that goes since August without actual solution for ObjC.

Our app already integrate iCloud and Adobe CC, I was excited about bringing Dropbox to our users but that won't apparently happen soon.

It is a shame.
Russ B.4
New member | Level 1
9 years ago
Steve,

My ObjectiveCBridgeable proposal is designed for these sorts of scenarios. It's currently in review, not sure if it will be approved or make Swift 3 but it makes bridging between the two languages a lot easier without sacrificing advanced Swift features.
Tim J.6
New member | Level 2
9 years ago
I open sourced a Dropbox v2 client library I wrote to migrate my app Close-up over to v2 today. It's named TJDropbox, you can check it out on Github here. It's 100% Objective-C and has no dependencies. It only supports a few endpoints for now, but it's easily extensible and may be useful for others! It even allows for migration from the v1 SDK if that's what you're currently using.
vincy w.
New member | Level 1
9 years ago
Dropbox Swify, as per today is it usable by existing objc apps?