“Sync is the new save”; Dropbox’s ambitious bid to “replace the hard drive” by making it easy for users to sign into Dropbox from many other apps
August 19, 2013 Leave a comment
August 18, 2013 3:50 pm
Dropbox hopes to exploit tech rivalries
By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco
“Sync is the new save,” declared Drew Houston, chief executive of Dropbox, at the cloud storage company’s first developer conference in San Francisco last month,writes Tim Bradshaw.
Mr Houston made an ambitious bid to “replace the hard drive” by making it easy for users to sign into Dropbox from many other apps. His hope is that this will make users more likely to pay for extra storage and, crucially, make them less prone to switch to Apple or Google’s rival products.The DBX event attracted hundreds of developers, from small start-ups to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, to hear about Dropbox’s plans to broaden its online platform.
The Dropbox Chooser, first announced in November 2012, brings a Windows-style file system to smartphones and tablets running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, which have typically removed the PC interface of folders. Another plug-in or “Drop In” is the Saver, which gives website owners the tools to let visitors save pages or files to their Dropbox with a single click.
The new Datastore API takes Dropbox beyond specific files. It allows app makers to integrate Dropbox’s syncing technology and apply it to contacts, bookmarks, to-do list items, saved progress in video games and other app-specific data. Datastore brings Dropbox into more direct competition with Apple’s iCloud and Google’s developer tools in Android.
Dropbox is not bundled with every device, like Apple and Google’s syncing technology, but it has the advantage of working across any mobile platform, allowing users to stop playing a game on a Samsung Galaxy smartphone then continue where they left off with the same game running on an Apple iPad. Competition between those tech giants has made compatibility complicated, a problem Dropbox hopes to exploit by positioning itself as a neutral player.
“We have all these companies making all this amazing stuff,” Mr Houston said. “The problem is they are all trying to punch each other in the face.”
Dropbox hopes that “finally some of those walls can come down”, Mr Houston said. “You don’t have to worry about what logo is on the back of your device . . . This is an important step in fixing a lot of what’s wrong with technology, to restore people’s faith in technology, and make things actually work in a complicated world.”
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