Folders and files status icons not working as intended on Windows

Hi Hannah​ 

I think the issue is more about behaviour that Dropbox used to have versus what it has now.

If we consider the following folders and contents as shown below:

All folders now have the Blue Cloud icon. Before the update, Dropbox would have shown a green tick with an outline for the first folder, and also the last folder. The contents of the first folder in the above example looks like:

The third folder looks like the following:

And the subfolder looks like the following:

With the Dropbox behaviour before the update, it was easy to see which folders had any offline files, by making it easy to drill-down as necessary.

But as you can see with the examples above, that is no longer the case. In the first image, there is no way of knowing which folders contain any offline files (or subfolders with offline files) because the icon is exactly the same.

I understand that, since the update, the icons above do conform to the new meaning of the icons at:

https://help.dropbox.com/sync/sync-icons-windows

But the problem is that the Windows/OneDrive meaning of the tick with a green outline (which is what Dropbox now follows) is quite different to the original meaning it had in Dropbox. I assume, unfortunately, that Dropbox no longer has any control over the icons used, or their meaning and behaviour, because this is now in the control of Microsoft, not Dropbox.

In my view, Dropbox's decision to switch to Microsoft's status icons is a step backwards. It means I might as well just use OneDrive now, and no longer use Dropbox. My switch to Dropbox was largely because its status icon approach was different to Microsoft.

What is worse, Dropbox doesn't give users the choice to keep the original status icon approach. The change just happened suddenly, with no warning, and no way to stop the update from occurring. There was no opt-out option.