Dropbox support for macOS 12.3

Dropbox has had over a year to get with the program, yet still drags its feet.  This isn't some tiny mom and pop software outfit with a few thousand users...it's a multinational corporation valued at over $8 billion. Not million, BILLION.  How can they possibly have any excuses left at this point?

You say we are whinging, but where I come from, we have a saying: the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  It is absolutely unacceptable to pay 10s of thousands of dollars, every year, for software that does not work as advertised!  Now is not the time for making excuses.  Nor is it time for Dropbox to "put their hand up." 

They need to FIX the software and get it current, NOW.  We (and many others I'm sure) are sick of the delays and broken implementation.  We are looking elsewhere.  Some of us have already dropped the service entirely.  The longer this goes on, the more incentive there is for the rest of us to move on and leave Dropbox in the rear view.  If Sharepoint wasn't such a nightmare we'd be gone already.

When can we expect a dropbox fix for 12.3 and onwards (latest 12.4). 

There was promised a solution and so far nothing has happened.... clients are not happy about this, and pushing on with sharepoint/onedrive as a replacement option

What are InDesign creatives doing about this?

What are DropBox software engineers doing about this?

We are downgrading our staff from Monterey to Big Sur to keep them happy and productive.

Dropbox Support do not seem to understand that the Monterey implementation of online only/local file syncing no longer functions the way it used to under Big Sur. They tell me that 'cloud only' (zero file size) linked files in InDesign on macOS Monterey need to first be locally synced to prevent this workflow error message pop-up - but this didn't used to be the case under macOS Big Sur.

I provided DB Support with a screen recording illustrating the problem (see this link: www.dropbox.com/s/5lmtck47lk1cowt/Dropbox%20Big%20Sur%20InDesign.mov?dl=0 showing that this was not required under macOS Big Sur. Other forum posts say that MS OneDrive on macOS Monterey is not generating this linked file error message.

yes, we are having the same issue for months w/o any ETA from Dropbox. it would force us to use a competitor as this is not a good workflow.

mharper that is crazy that that is the response you get. clearly tier 1 support is just completely in the dark. 

I just contacted support again to see if they actually passed on my screen recording to the engineers. They said they can see it was passed on. I asked for financial compensation (reduced DB fees) for the period of time that our workflow and productivity and they said they would pass on my request. I reminded them that Apple are about to release macOS Ventura, so there’s no point focusing on getting Dropbox to work with Monterey, there’s a whole generation of macOS that Dropbox has failed to 100% work on. I read they have $8 billion in user fees that they are sitting on. But yet, they don’t have the software engineering resources to solve this. I actually have a ‘conspiracy theory’ that Dropbox can’t solve this on their own without getting Apple engineers to help them, and Apple engineers want Dropbox to provide their back of house code before Apple will help them, but Dropbox will not want to do this. My theory is that Apple want to see Dropboxes backend ‘best in class’ sync code so they can improve iCloud Drive syncing, which, like OneDrive and probably others, is a slow dog, compared to Dropbox. I personally have used Dropbox since the first year it was released, and know it is the best in class, but this issue (and their awful new choice of wording for online/offline sync status) makes me sad for Dropbox and their loyal customers. 

To me this seems the story of the company that fired the most capable (and expensive) developers to save fixed expenses and now they've discovered that some real work cannot be done with interns, and they aren't able to find developers capable of doing what needs to be do (you can see they are looking for a lot of seniors developers).

Said that, currently I've removed all Dropbox from my Macs and I'm using it from web only. My main use of Dropbox is maintain about 600 GB of PDF related to literature, technology and science as indexed stuff from DEVONthink. I've moved all of that into internal DEVONthink databases. The only handicap is I need a Mac to do fast queries (I used Dropbox internal search for that from Windows when I was in Windows). 

If they solve this problem before my current year payment ends, I will go back. If not, well, goodbye forever, Dropbox. And the solution to this is use my Synology NAS as a cloud provider. WebDAV could be enough to me.

GlassDoor employee comments….

A lot of senior executives have left DBX over the past 12 months.

Confused management… Advice to Management… Find clarity and direction, particularly in the B2B market - if you're not willing to invest towards making it work then rip the bandaid and pull out.

BAD Management… HR just say nice things and refuse to believe there are serious issues in the company.

Hello Walter 

May i ask for a status update? 

Thank you!