[inopinatus]

The client is now full of all kinds of irritating nagware to enable this and that unnecessary feature, even though I’m a paying customer already. Doing so whilst ignoring the design language of the OS is a hallmark of applications arrogantly deluded of their own importance. The Dropbox client UX now puts me in mind of 90s-era RealPlayer, which surely ranks as one of the worst software products of all time.

I do not appreciate intrusive micromanagement and passive-aggressive interdepartmental memos from humans, let alone from my file sync utility, and when this occurs separately on every god-damn device and even after a time machine recovery, I find myself verbally abusing it, and the product managers that spawned it, aloud in the most vulgar language.

Not good, Dropbox.

[new2628]

The web interface also went downhill from its initial simplicity. Hitting the download button for a pdf file in my own dropbox folder (99.99% of my use case) has become a whack-a-mole, with a constant danger of accidentally connecting some app with the document, entering some kind of crazy collaborative editing/commenting mode, updating my "profile", installing a dropbox app, getting notified of something, or activating some kind of sharing feature, none of which I ever used or wanted.

[dbxerthrowaway]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by nagware? Are they OS notifications, "ads" in the tray or the Dropbox app?

[an_opabinia]

I am a paying Dropbox user.

When I click the Dropbox icon in my system tray, 43% of the space is used on two ad units: trying to "introduce Gmail integration" and "Recent shows the latest activity." Here you go - https://imgur.com/a/51MiWOb

You silently enabled some new syncing mechanism that doesn't actually download files to my computer. This was absolutely nuts and is a far more serious violation of why I used Dropbox, and it almost made me churn. I was so angry that I had to change some kind of setting on the web to sync with selective sync and have real bonafide files in my Dropbox folder again.

The ultimate nagware: Open folders in: Dropbox desktop app by default is garbage. Obviously people want to open Finder / Explorer, that is the whole value proposition of Dropbox. I don't care about your product manager's monetization schemes or introducing Paper or whatever, please just never mess with defaults because I'm not comfortable suggesting this app to my parents if it litters them with new paradigms and garbage. How do your PMs not understand how important those referrals are? How integral simplicity is to those referrals? Just because you guys don't measure them, just because there isn't a chart going up and to the right, doesn't mean it's not real.

The backups nagware. Nobody wants that. People get they have to store stuff in the dropbox folder. I do not want to confuse my parents, "Sometimes Documents is backed up, sometimes not." It's unambiguous. Again, messing with the simplicity.

The photos nagware. Nobody wants to do that. People use Photos on their iPhone, it's fine. Don't eat up storage on something they use iCloud for.

The Accessibility prompt. You don't need it. Why are you asking for Accessibility?

Permissions to access Documents, Desktop, Downloads without backup. Again you don't need that.

Nagware, adware, product managerware. I hope this is sufficient.

The lack of care here is mindboggling for a product so simple. Everyone should embrace the idea that they're much more likely to make it worse rather than better. Drew Houston should be putting that on a huge billboard behind him on his Zoom calls to 22 year olds fresh out of school, it should be your motto, it should be the first sentence out of everyone's mouth, regardless of what the numbers or metrics or surveys say.

[foobiekr]

Yep. I’ve been a paying Dropbox customer pretty much from the start. The quality of the current Dropbox is atrocious and I ended up with entire directories of corrupted files full of null bytes as a bonus.

I am looking to move as soon as I find something which isn’t garbage.

[inopinatus]

I'm mostly a macOS user, so by this I'm referring to the litany of prompts I have to dismiss in the menu bar drop-down.

I just opened it up on this machine and behold, there's a new one, bizarrely hoping I might connect my calendar (no thanks).

Fun fact: I mostly option-click the Dropbox icon to force it back to system style. The UX inconsistency and unwelcome intrusions otherwise just interfere with whatever I'm actually trying to do (usually, pause syncing).

[inopinatus]

Got another one today, exhorting me to share things via/with the Dropbox mobile app.

For crying out loud, I'm already signed in on the fucking app. I've been using it for years.

Are you trying to drive away paying customers? This is how it happens.

[m4rtink]

For all the UI badness Real Player had some impressive compression support, at least back in the day. I remember watching the stream of a launch of one of the early ISS modules over what was effectively a dialup connectio. The quality was pretty good for that and you could see what was going on pretty well.