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Dropbox finally testing native Apple Silicon version

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.

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.



4 Comments

payeco 17 Years · 581 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. 

ITGUYINSD 5 Years · 550 comments

payeco said:
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 bother"?  Why not?  Maestral is a very barebones DB client.  It may be sufficient for you, but is missing features many need.

If Dropbox releases a full-featured client in AS, then Maestral is now at a disadvantage.  

macxpress 16 Years · 5913 comments

Why not just use iCloud Drive? It can do the same thing. 

StrangeDays 8 Years · 12986 comments

macxpress said:
Why not just use iCloud Drive? It can do the same thing. 

It doesn’t tho. (last time I tried it) You cannot share folders with people who don’t have an Apple ID. This is super lame. iCloud Drive needs a web client/viewer that can be accessed by anonymous users who have the folder’s link, not just add it as a shared folder to their own iCloud.