Apple Silicon (M1) Desktop Sync Compatibility

18th highest voted. Let’s keep this rising, folks…

Sorry to tell you, but it is utterly ridiculous to wait for "more votes" to stick to the pacing of a worldwide industry and increasing number of users. I'm speaking on behalf of countless colleagues on the creative field who are considering other alternatives for Dropbox if the M1 support doesn't appear soon. You've so far succeeded to serve your customers. Don't stumble on your arrogance.

Jouni Completely agreed. This is a performance enhancement which won't be noticed by many end users and therefore won't get as many votes as some flashy new widget. However, those users who *do* care about it are typically in a position to make purchasing decisions and / or to advice large numbers of end users. Ignore them at your peril.

And that's on top of the fact that recompiling for Apple Silicon should be trivial if your codebase is anywhere near being properly maintained.

I've stopped paying Dropbox months ago at this point, because I refuse to pay for obsolete software. I keep it as a huge read-only free repository, and I'm using a different product now.

However, I have to say that this comment thread has become a source of amusement: the ineptitude of decision makers at Dropbox is so comical at this point, that one can only laugh about it.

Martin H.53 one wishes that they would get rid of the "flashy widgets" you mention, years and years of useless crap which has been haphazardly bolted on, and that nobody cares about, especially when it's just a poor excuse to inflate prices as much as they can get away with.

They had a decent product - file sync. They should stick to that, remove the crust that was probably envisioned by less than sober marketing interns, stop doing nasty things (not much time passed since Dropbox was literally hacking your Mac to get ungranted privileges behind your back https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/20/dropbox-macos-security), bring back the price to reasonable standards in line with today's cheap storage costs, and keep up with technology (and by technology I mean, recompile for the M1, forget annoying MS Office integrations).

Will they do it? No. Dropbox has jumped the shark a long, long time ago. In fact, in the world of software, "has dropboxed" is the new "has jumped the skark".

You can see other products that are Dropboxing - they reach a point where the product is very good, and they start targeting other audiences forgetting the ones that made them successful. 1Password, anyone?

Do not despair; Dropbox is leaving a huge hole in the market that will be filled soon. It won't be too long before employees at Dropbox find themselves filling boxes with their belongings, wondering what happened, "the new corporate colors were so hip, the new logo was so artfully crafted, how could this happen?"
They're just asleep at the wheel, they won't listen, they won't care - until they crash.

History isn't kind to companies who don't listen.

Megan Hannah - Has this been brought to the attention of the Product Manager yet or is it still with the customer support team?

The reason I ask is this is revenue impacting request and it seems to be causing churn. As a Product Manager myself, I know that normally PM's are targeted on Revenue, Churn and Acquisition. This will be negatively impacting those targets and they may wish to know.

Looking through the comments since I originally posted this, people have made a lot of good points. One of the most important points is this idea relates to another one and if we add all the votes up there are a lot. Another point is this shouldn't be looked at as an enhancement request. This is asking for the functionality of Dropbox to work on a mainstream device (new Mac's)

We just bought our first M1 MacBook, and had to move some of our files off of it, because a key app became too slow accessing the file when it was on Dropbox (it worked fine if it was on iCloud Drive). 

My research shows that Box has a beta available that is native, OneDrive says they will be native by the end of the year. And of course there is iCloud Drive - which is tempting because we are an all Mac shop. 

Without any information on when/if Dropbox will have a native app, we will begin the process of migrating to another cloud drive solution within the next couple months - so I hope you hear that there is a need, and begin to do something about it. We've been on Dropbox since near the time it first started. 

donbkatz 

My company is migrating away from Dropbox as well because of a lack of native Apple Silicon Support.  Beware of OneDrive...It is limited by archaic Windows folder/file naming conventions (thank you SharePoint).  We have 1000's of files and folders that would need to be renamed because either the entire folder/file then is too long for OneDrive or they contain characters not supported in OneDrive file/folder names.  

I have been running the Apple Silicon Box beta and it is good.  The only downside of Box for us is that they do not support the same SmartSync features as DropBox (selective sync...yes, smart sync no).  This will suck in the short term on our machines that do not have a lot of available drive space, but they will be replaced over the next year with M1X macs.

Good luck with you migration!  Dropbox is losing a nice corporate contract from my company because they refuse to modernize the mac app for Apple Silicon (SHM).

I thought it was a joke when I couldn't find a native M1 client for Dropbox. Are you kidding me, the company that brags about The cloud-based file sharing company in Q1 saw a 30 percent year-over-year increase in paid users of Dropbox Professional and yet is too cheap to hire the software engineers to create a native M1 client making users vote for it and then simply quit the service? 

"Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $141.8 million, or 35 cents per share. Revenue was $511.6 million, up 12 percent year-over-year" and you have no money to develop a simple client? I am looking for an alternative too as your software eats huge amount of resources. 

So as of today we are on the second generation of M1 Macs, and still no native app. I feel really helpless on this, as it will be logistically very difficult to move around all my files that I have relied on Dropbox to selectively sync for a decade now. I do not like being trapped by pathetically poor engineering with no good alternative. I guess that's the problem...they know it's hard to move and there isn't enough competition, so Dropbox feels they can ignore their customers.

This is not a feature request that needs "community votes". This is a basic software compatibility. Get your sh!t together, this is not freeware. I actually pay more per year for Dropbox than almost any other app or online service. 

Really this isn't even on the roadmap yet? DB should really address this issue or face the loss of Mac users. I've been with DB for as long as I can remember and as soon as we upgrade our MacBook Pros, it will be a very easy decision to leave.