9to5Mac

Dropbox M1 support won’t happen unless more people vote for it, says company

By Ben Lovejoy

October 28, 2021

Dropbox M1 support still hasn’t arrived, even after Apple launched its new MacBook Pro models that run on more powerful versions of the chip. Worse, the company claims there isn’t yet enough support for the idea to make it a priority.

Other Mac owners agreed that the Rosetta option is a very poor solution. Agreed, while Dropbox does operate under Rosetta without bugs, the power and ram resources required are silly. With dropbox running I cannot get anywhere near the expected battery life with casual use. Quit Dropbox and we get back to some semblance of normalcy. Come on now, I pay for this service, it’s not freeware done by one dude at home, this should have been ready for M1 long ago.

Incredibly, a Dropbox representative said they weren’t even going to share the suggestion internally without more support! This idea is going to need a bit more support before we share your suggestion with our team. 

Customers are understandably expressing their incredulity that they have to vote on this to make it happen. “This really shouldn’t be something that we vote on. If Dropbox wants to support Macs it HAS to include that, otherwise it shouldn’t be available for the platform anymore and customers have to go somewhere else – it’s a simple business decision and not a nice-to-have!” “This is becoming comical.”

“This is ridiculous.” “Given that it took them right up until Apple discontinued 32-bit support completely to bother recompiling Dropbox as a 64-bit binary (i.e. it took them almost 10 years), I really wouldn’t hold my breath. At this stage, my impression is that the Dropbox development team consists of one part-time intern in a basement.”

Since battery life is a key benefit of Apple Silicon, it seems truly astonishing that Dropbox doesn’t understand that this problem is a massive incentive for Mac users to switch to a competing cloud service. I currently have my entire Documents folder mirrored on Dropbox as it’s historically been faster to update, and easier to share files, than iCloud – but I’ll be rapidly jumping ship for sure if the company doesn’t fix this.