Dropbox finally testing native Apple Silicon version
William Gallagher
As Apple enters what is likely the last stretch of its two-year transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, cloud file sync company Dropbox is at last testing a native version.
Tim Cook announced Apple Silicon in June 2020. Apple also began issuing Developer Transition Kits that same month.
From then until around a year later in June 2021, the Dropbox company ignored questions about its moving to Apple Silicon. It most noticeably ignored the growing number of people asking in its own support forums.
Finally in October 2021, the company said that it was working on a beta version.
We're certainly supporting Apple Silicon, sorry for the confusion. We've been working for a while on a native M1 build which we aim to release in H1 2022. (And agree the responses in the support thread were not ideal)
— Drew Houston (@drewhouston) October 28, 2021
According to MacRumors, that beta has now begun testing. A small number of Mac Dropbox users are testing at present, and the company intends to widen that to all Dropbox beta users by the end of January.
The company appears on schedule with its aim of launching "in H1 2022." In the meantime, Apple's rival service, iCloud Folder Sharing, has been improving and is now potentially a replacement for Dropbox.
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4 Comments
Why bother? I switched to Maestral for my Dropbox client and haven’t looked back. It’s supported native Apple Silicon for a while now and it uses a fraction of the system resources of the official client. It doesn’t support binary diff but unless you’re working with huge files that doesn’t really matter.
Why not just use iCloud Drive? It can do the same thing.