You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Make offline files visible in the android filesystem
I think you should make files stored offline on Android available in the file system. As it is now, the dropbox files marked as 'available offline' are hidden from the rest of the operating system. This gives a number of problems: 1: When opening a file in an app, that app may put the file path in its 'most recently used documents'-list. However, since the path it gets from the Dropbox-app is not long-lived, the 'most recently used documents'-list becomes unusable, since the links on it become dead rather quickly. 2: It makes using browsing apps, like photo viewers or podcast players, on your offline files impossible. 3: Some apps expect content to be found on the file system. For example, the samsung app used to download content onto a samsung smart watch, expects to find files in the file system. It cannot be used to download files from dropbox onto the smart watch. 4: Sometimes a smart phone is used a bit like a computer. Like uploading files to an FTP-server and the like. A FTP-client typically expects to find files on the file system, and allows them to be selected and uploaded. This does not work with Dropbox. A possible work-around is to export the contents from the dropbox offline folder onto the phones regular file system. This is unsatisfactory because: 1) It feels cumbersome. The number of clicks to send a podcast episode to a smart watch, or to download a .pdf from dropbox and upload to an FTP-server, becomes a few too many. 2) For files which can be edited (like password manager saves, various profiles, text documents etc), the user needs to remember to copy the file back to Dropbox, which is very error prone. Dropbox obviously already has technology to synk a file system folder with dropbox. Could not this functionality be offered on smart phones also?
I'm getting an error that the mobile app is not compatible with my Android device. Why is that?
As per my first image from the Android Play Store, It explains that the latest version of Dropbox is no longer compatible with my Samsung Galaxy TM235 :tired_face: The second screenshot shows the error when trying to login to either the latest version or the default build App that was on the device(2.4.4.8) Regaudless of the build they both return the invalid Email error as shown. Lastly for anyone who might think that I've forgotten my Password there's another shot from the same device connected to Dropbox (it also ask do i wish to install Dropbox. which takes me round to the playsore and shows the first non-compatible error)where does dropsync belong in all this
I used to have just two android devices, a tablet and a phone. For long I tried to emulate my old experience with backup systems in Mac, and tried to bend dropbox to that task. It never seemed to work very well: syncing was always interrupted by one or another. Today I'm now also running a copy of Windows 11 Pro, on its own device, but I still get missives from Dropbox (if not more!) Over recent days, Dropbox has encouraged me to run their "automated" setup, which seems to target my pc. And I do admit it seemed pretty easy to activate an auto backup of Windows files of my choosing. That's great, and thank you. But now I'm wondering, well, what about backing up my android devices, too? I'm either not equipped or interested enough to pursue this on my own. Should I continue to wrestle with Dropsync, or is there a way to utilize what seems to be this "new" Dropbox facility? All you nerd types, you should know, from my perspective, Dropbox seems impenetrably dense. This is why I was encouraged to try their "new" approach, which is adequate (I think) to manage Windows backup, but makes me continue to wonder, can this swell bliss be adapted to manage my Android files? Dump Dropsync or use it?
