Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Background activity iOS from the mobile app.
Hi, Just notice that Dropbox keeps active in the background on iOS, even if i disable it in the settings from iOS. After some testing I found the problem, the integration with the files app causes...
Daphne
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorThanks for all your updates here everyone!
For a little more info on why you may see the Dropbox app showing background activity, please check out my previous post here.
If you're seeing a high battery usage on your device, then please send me a screenshot of this so that I can look into this further with you. For example, on my personal device the background activity shows 10 hours+ but the battery usage is less than 1%.
If you're not sure on how to show the battery usage instead of the activity, please check out the steps here.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Hi Daphne, thanks and just ‘voting’ for this ongoing issue.
I observed significant background usage from Dropbox. For me 59mins each hour. My battery usage graph is maxed out every hour, daily with Dropbox usage including overnight.
I noted above comment, and I can confirm this completely ceased when I switched of connection to iOS Files App.
Dropbox still installed. Current iOS 13.5.1 & Dropbox app up to date. Photos sync NOT on.
So it seems issue is isolated only to link with Files App.
Let me know if I can provide any more information. Hope we have an update soon.
Thanks.
I observed significant background usage from Dropbox. For me 59mins each hour. My battery usage graph is maxed out every hour, daily with Dropbox usage including overnight.
I noted above comment, and I can confirm this completely ceased when I switched of connection to iOS Files App.
Dropbox still installed. Current iOS 13.5.1 & Dropbox app up to date. Photos sync NOT on.
So it seems issue is isolated only to link with Files App.
Let me know if I can provide any more information. Hope we have an update soon.
Thanks.
Well, I just notice this to. I disabled Dropbox in the Files app and its all good now. This needs to be fixed ASAP.
- Daphne
Hey everyone, thanks for your patience while I looked into this!
So that we can do some additional investigation into this, I've reached out to each of you here so we can have a look into this alongside device specific info.
When you have the chance, please check your inbox for my message and we can take it from there.
Let me know if you don't receive my message or have any questions!
I am having the same issue. Dropbox for iOS is draining my battery when the iPad is sitting ideal.
- No offline files
- connected to Files.app
- Background Activity "on"
Seems like a glitch or bug to allow Dropbox to use this much resources when no activity should be taking place.
- Exact same situation here. I only recently noticed when I was looking for the cause of my battery drain. Most definitely Dropbox is running in background and using up my battery (even when the Background App Refresh is off) as long as it’s connected to the files app. NO OTHER CLOUD STORAGE APP CONNECTED TO THE FILES APP DOES THIS. Therefore it’s no valid to blame this behavior on Apple’s File App. Had to disable the integration with Files. So now Dropbox’s usefulness is reduced for me, and I’m seriously considering moving my files altogether from Dropbox. I was reading this thread and I’m surprised to find out this issue has been reported several months ago and Dropbox still hasn’t acknowledged it
Hi!
I’m experiencing the same issue, so just want to subscribe to the thread to get notification when this will be fixed and I can reenable the integration in the Files app.
I won’t post screenshots as the issue is already well known. However, @Daphne is wrong about battery usage.
You said that even with the high amount of background activity, the % usage was super low. Well, it’s not. iPhone DOES NOT show the total % of usage. It shows the PROPORTION. This means, the % shown in Battery panel just show comparison to other apps, not total usage. This is obvious that activity used apps (web browser, instant messages, social media etc.) will be shown with a way higher % of usage due to fact of using the screen on and other stuff.
I just took a look on my 10 days period and I easily see my most used apps in the top. However, there are plenty of apps that I use everyday (with screeen on) but occasionally and they are below Dropbox % usage that I haven’t used during summer at all.
Hope this helps and makes it more clear to everyone, why % can be very low with with very high timed usage. The % usage doesn’t really matter as this is only a proportion between apps.When can we expect a fix? I can't believe Dropbox dropped the ball on this since April..
Having exact same issue .. for now, did as advised by other members and disabled Integration to Files
Waiting Dropbox team to resolve this issue asap
Interestingly enough, this might not be Dropbox only issue. I have a strong leads to believe this is some kind of iOS integration issue as the same happened with the built-in Mail app as well as speedtest, OpenVPM and other apps
thanks
- Same here. No solution from Dropbox about 6 months now. They just collected screenshots...
- Same issue -_-
Same issue. Add another one to the long list.
I have the same issue. I was hoping iOS 14 would fix this, but nope. Dropbox keeps running in background if I enable it on the Files app.
This just started happening for me concurrent with update to iOS 14 on iPhone XR. Nothing had changed about my use of the phone, or privacy/diagnostics/background refresh, etc. Dropbox background 'activity' became constant, although battery 'usage' showed only dashes Dropbox, battery drain was immediately noticeable with iOS 14 upgrade. Background Refresh was off globally, but this Dropbox activity and the battery draining didn't stop until I turned off Background Refresh individually for the app. (I hadn't tried just disabling in Files.) Prior to this, Dropbox showed activity for entire time Screen Off time overnight (59 minutes of every hour, matching 59 minutes Screen Off, no wifi on).
- Daphne
Hey k8bushlover!
When you have the time, please check out my post here for some more info on this. Cheers!
Thanks, I should have given it a bit more time--back to how it was a couple hours later. Will disable Files integration and see if that helps, and await further word.
I recently connected DropBox with Finder on iOS, and to my surprise my iPad was dead this morning. This has not happened as long as I can remember. Big is my surprise that DropBox STILL HAVE NOT FIXED THIS!
5 months or so later, and this is still going on with no fix provided. No other cloud-based services like Google Drive and MS OneDrive seem to be doing anything similar. I'm gonna have to move the files somewhere else and get rid of this.
I can even sort of see what Dropbox's been trying to do here; their real-time sync in the desktop client is very convenient. On mobile devices, though, the same behaviour is simply not desired for the sake of the battery life.
- Same here. I only use a very small percentage of allowed space and I already pay for iCloud storage so I really should stop using Dropbox.
I wanna be fair here: I'm not going to make any sweeping statements about leaving the service entirely (as I said, it's still very comfortable and convenient on desktop OSs). Plus, Apple is also partially to blame here — giving the users the option to disable the background app refresh in iOS, then letting the developers bypass this preference entirely…
So, I'll keep using Dropbox for desktop, but I'm going to have to move away files that I want to be accessible from my iPhone until this issue is properly addressed. The mobile app has forced me to merely change my use case, but it's still a pity that I've had to do that.
Good luck to the developers. This task may not be as easy as we BFUs might think.
- still not resolved.. I guess its time to uninstall dropbox and switch to another solution.
