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Data Storage Operating Systems Software Technology

Dropbox Accidentally Installed New File Manager App On Users' Systems (arstechnica.com) 74

Posted by BeauHD from the whoopsie-daisy dept.
Dropbox said it accidentally exposed a new desktop app experience to some users for a short period of time. While the issue has since been resolved, many users were caught off guard after being silently "upgraded" to this radically different version of Dropbox. Ars Technica reports: This new version of Dropbox wants to be... a file manager? Instead of the minimal sync app, the Dropbox icon now opens a big, multi-panel, blue and white window showing all your Dropbox files. It kind of looks like Slack, if Slack was a file manager. You can now "star" folders as important so they show up in the left panel (again, like a Slack chat room). The middle panel shows your Dropbox files, and the right panel shows a file preview with options for comments and sharing. You can search for files, sort by name or date, and do all the usual file operations like cut, copy, and paste. It's a file manager.

A big part of the appeal of Dropbox is (was?) that it's a dead-simple product: it's a folder, in the cloud! Put your stuff in the folder, and it seamlessly gets backed up and synced to all your other computers. Part of using Dropbox means installing the sync app to your computer, and to keep everything fresh and up to date, Dropbox has the ability to silently update this app from time to time. Using this mechanism to silently install a bigger, more bloated, completely different version of the Dropbox app onto people's computers seems... wrong, especially with no notice whatsoever. Updates are one thing, but many users (your author included) feel like there was a lack of consent here. Here's the statement Dropbox issued earlier today: "We recently announced a new desktop app experience that is now currently available in Early Access. Due to an error, some users were accidentally exposed to the new app for a short period of time. The issue has been resolved, though there might be a short lag for some users to see resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."

Developer Marco Arment responded to the statement, tweeting: "'That immensely unpopular change we forced onto all of you yesterday? We only meant to force it on *some* of you. The rest of you weren't supposed to get it forced upon you until later.' Doesn't really fix the problem, does it?"
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Dropbox Accidentally Installed New File Manager App On Users' Systems More

Dropbox Accidentally Installed New File Manager App On Users' Systems

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  • Somewhat related, but I had been using Dropbox for years and had been very happy with it. At first I used it just to backup pictures I took, but over time I was using it more and more. Recently I rebuilt a PC and installed dropbox and it told me I couldn't link it because the new terms were free = only three devices. Sure, I understand, but I am not going to pay for this. I had already been running my own, er, owncloud server and have spent the past day cutting over everything to it. Just a few hours ago I

  • Yeah, this is Creeping Featuritis at work.

    Creeping Featuritis is a software disease that causes applications to inexorably increase in size, metastasizing all sorts of new tumors, errr, I mean 'features' that most users didn't ask for and don't want. Eventually the application does everything imaginable, from telling the time to reporting the weather conditions on Mars.

    It's ultimately fatal to the application although it may take years or even decades to kill the host.

    You could say it's a terminal disease.

    • Well, you could say it's a terminal disease except that software running in a terminal seems to be less likely to bloat as quickly. Probably because the UX people can't use it, can't grok it, so can't fuck it up. Same goes for managers. "Too technical!" "My computer runs Windows, not DOS!" "Where do I click???"

  • Simple is the whole reason I use it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Thursday July 18, 2019 @07:48PM (#58948702)

    Dropbox is of course free to make any product that I want, but if I cease to be able to use it as a distributed file system, or if it has annoying pop-up interfaces, I'll cancel my (non-free) account and move everything to OneDrive since I already have files there.

    Its a competitive market, and customers get to vote with their money.

  • "Accidentally."

    Yeah, right.

  • Another fucking file manager? Each app on machines these days tries to do everything and each app its trying to do the same thing other apps do, for example steam, battle.net, uplay, etc etc.

    I just want to open a game. I just want to open a file. I have a perfectly functional file browser called explorer.exe

    Fuck off and leave my machine the way I WANT IT.

  • It will never be ready for release. We don't want it. Pink slips!

  • I consciously gave up all syncing in the last couple of years. I've got a single 15" laptop, and that's the be-all end-all. I used to have an extra desktop, and later a tablet, and used Dropbox and later OwnCloud to have everything synced.

    In the end, there's always SOMETHING. I got frustrated with little things, like this OS update or that application update, or some sync conflict, et cetera. OwnCloud is great but until three years ago, definitely required fiddling every now and then. Dropbox looked attract

  • That weird explorer thingie turned up on two of my machines today with no fanfare. I just assumed it was another of Dropbox's attempts to be "helpful", like that badge it wants to put on all my docs and its attempts to add itself as a save location in Office. Or the time it's confusing website got me to upgrade to a business account, where suddenly I had to add myself as a user on my own dropbox, which had moved directories and... well, I could go on. I want it to sync my files. That's it. Oh, I became a p
  • I had this appear on OS X. It's pretty annoying because once installed the DropBox context menu items, such as creating a sharable link, vanish from Finder. You have to go into the DropBox file manager for those tasks.
  • What about some sort of DLP?

    Because those are some of the reasons enterprises should shun it.

  • Overzealous management kills the product (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DigitalisAkujin ( 846133 ) on Friday July 19, 2019 @07:41AM (#58950668) Homepage

    For some reason in the tech industry management can never be happy delivering a perfect never changing product. I know why this is the case but the reality is these changes generally run a product into the ground until what was once a good product actually ends up being complete crap.

    I was one of the first users of Dropbox. My Dropbox user ID is 4 digits.

    When it came out it was incredible. It's still has the best syncing algorithm. It has the ability to tell only what changed in a file and sync only that making syncing much less painful on bandwidth then it's competitor's. It's ability to seamlessly integrate with the shell on the operating system is also by far the best feature.

    When it first came out I was able to drop files into the "Public" folder. Right click on said file. Hit copy link and paste it into whatever chat I was using at the time. Skype or IRC come to mind during that time.

    These days I'm just pasting those images directly into Discord or Slack or Riot (Matrix.org) so I guess Dropbox's use has waned but I feel like if they didn't keep messing with it I'd probably use it more. The first interactions of Dropbox were very light. A very small DLL load in explorer.exe with minimal flare and native UI components.

    These days the only thing I use it for is storing small legal documents (PDFs, tax stuff, etc). I also store my crypto wallets in there but inside of a small (100 MB) Veracrypt volume.

    I can easily throw that stuff on any other cloud file host no problem.

    They are also making the free version worse and worse. In the early days they would give away free space all the time. Giving users quizzes and fun games to unlock extra free space. These days they are locking your free account into only being able to have 4 clients connected. Silly when you only have a desktop, a laptop, and maybe a phone or two. Now anytime I have an upgrade I have to remove the old one manually even if I'm not using it. Now these asshole managers probably think "haha free? fuck him" but what they don't see is how I've been recommending their product to business customers for the past decade. I have since stopped recommending Dropbox (despite their technical lead). Why should I give two fucks anymore? It's easier to integrate with Microsoft 360 or Google Suites. This despite the technical lead Dropbox has with their sync.

    Yet another example of a generally great product being run into the ground by management.

    • The real problem here is that Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

      Dropbox is being 'forced' to compete with the likes of Microsoft OneDrive and even iCloud to a certain extent. Adding cloud storage to existing products isn't entirely trivial, but companies like Microsoft and Apple have the money to throw at it if they want to.

      Making your cloud storage syncing service more appealing to a broader audience is hard as time goes on, so DropBox is experimenting with tacking features onto the

      • Or they could, you know, offer new features and products without automatically installing them. Perhaps using the number of downloads of a new app as a metric for if their customers are actually interested in it, instead of trying to MAKE people be interested in it. I cancelled when they started retiring simple copy and pastable links and added the ability for users to "comment" on my files. I just want a folder that syncs. Other places can do that now.

  • From help.dropbox.com (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Will the new desktop app change how my files are synced?

    The new Dropbox desktop app doesn’t change the way your files are synced to your computer in any way. You can continue using the Dropbox folder in Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows) exactly as you did before. You can even change your preferences to continue to open the Dropbox folder by default instead of the new desktop app.

    https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/desktop-application-overview

  • With the new payment plan and their unnecessary plan to grow Dropbox into "more than a cloud," I went to Nextcloud and I won't look back. A little reverse-vpn work (amusing project) and I have it working on my home network despite my ISP trying to those ports. I also used Resilio Sync on my media server. While that was more plug and play, it doesn't integrate so well with my devices especially my company iPad and Resilio has, in their misguided wisdom, won't open the API without payment from developers.

  • Face Recognition for Photos? (Score:3)

    by Scroatzilla ( 672804 ) on Friday July 19, 2019 @10:15AM (#58951422) Homepage Journal

    I'm a long-time Dropbox user. I was recently invited to fill out a Dropbox survey. The thrust of it was to determine my interest level in, and how much I would pay for, the "enhancement" of automatic facial recognition for photos stored on its platform. My interest level could only go as low as zero in the survey answers, when in reality I am repulsed by this idea. It would have been much more accurate if I were able to choose "Please don't do that." It also would not let me choose "$0" for the "now how much would you pay" questions, as they described more and more invasive features.

    Why the heck would I *pay them* to collect private data about me? I wanted cloud file storage, not spyware.

    Luckily I don't use Dropbox for photos, but if/when they implement this "feature," I'm done with Dropbox.

  • Are there open source alternatives?

    Specifically I'm looking for a cross platform (Android, iPhone, Linux, Windows) open source client that does selective delta file sync to/from a device to a server or cloud service like S3 or Azure Blob with bonus points if you can match the android and iPhone "camera upload" feature and the public folder functionality.

    I was doing scripted rsync (about 10 years ago pre-dropbox), but now that I'm spoiled with DB I don't think I could go back.

    My $119 per year is up for grabs

  • Ok I want to dip out. Say I'm not a very techie person but I can paste commands into a putty window. How do I make my own local dropbox with a right-click context menu of 'copy link' and I mean the direct link(that still works with dropbox if you remove the www. and use dl.).

    Have a spare netbook that is more than capable of running something like that with the pitiful amount of files that would be on it. What do I use?

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