Dropbox Access Tokens - How do they work?

Rich F.5 wrote:

... how I get a fully working Access Token that won't expire within a few hours. Do I need a membership of some sort for this to happen?

Dropbox is no longer offering the option for creating new long-lived (i.e. non-expiring) access tokens. Dropbox is now issuing short-lived access tokens (and optional refresh tokens) instead of long-lived access tokens. You can find more information on this migration here.

Apps can still get long-term access by requesting "offline" access though, in which case the app receives a "refresh token" that can be used to retrieve new short-lived access tokens as needed, without further manual user intervention. Refresh tokens do not expire automatically and can be used repeatedly. You can find more information in the OAuth Guide and authorization documentation. There's a basic outline of processing this flow in this blog post which may serve as a useful example.

This is the same response you received from iNeil 6 months ago when posing a similar question.

OK, thank you for that.  My memory is fading.  

It's suggesting that long term access tokens currently in use won't be replaced.  Is this feature about to disappear?  I don't want my application to fold because Dropbox turns this feature of public submission off.  

Rich F.5 wrote:

It's suggesting that long term access tokens currently in use won't be replaced. Is this feature about to disappear?

They've long held that existing tokens, those created prior to the feature being deprecated/discontinued, will not be revoked. Whether or not that will change in the future, no one knows.

That being said, if you don't already have a long-lived token from before they were discontinued, you wouldn't be able to get one now. Your app needs to request offline access and use refresh tokens.

It's just that I'm about to start a company where using Dropbox is a way of getting files to the app.  It's more about Dropbox strategy or vision, than what tokens to use.