Dropbox Desktop App Sign-In Error - "Something went wrong - Try again or check out our Help Center."

[b20tski]

Hi all,

I just installed Dropbox on my Mac (10.15.7) and can't get the sign-in button to load any sign-in page. I get the very helpful error message after clicking the Sign in button "Something went wrong", followed by "Try again or check out our Help Center."

I can't find anything about this generic error on the Dropbox site, so I'm hoping the community has run into this before. I wish this error was a little more informative so I wouldn't be stuck and frustrated. I have nowhere to start troubleshooting with this error message.

Here's what I've tried so far:

I just reinstalled the Dropbox desktop app, downloading it both from the homepage as well as after signing in and clicking on my initials/icon and selecting the "install desktop app" button from there).

I completely removed (using AppZapper) Dropbox and all associated files.

I'm not having any issues aside from this app (connectivity or otherwise). Also, I'm not using any special firewall.. just the macOS built-in one. I've tried adding the Dropbox app there as well as the DropboxMacUpdate app from the app in the applications folder (Dropbox > Show Package Contents), just in case the firewall was blocking the app from signing in.

Any ideas?

Thanks all.

[Daphne]

Hey @b20tski, I hope you're having a good day!

Do you happen to be connecting via a proxy at all?

If not, please try using the offline installer from here, to see if that does the trick.

Let me know how it goes!

[b20tski]

Hi Daphne,

Thanks for the suggestions! I've checked for a proxy (I don't use one), but I found that Dropbox has an "auto-detect" option as well as a "None" option, so I went ahead and selected "None". Unfortunately, that didn't do anything. I also went ahead and tried the offline installer, which didn't seem to do anything different, either. Puzzling!

Still stuck with the same error. Hmm.

[Walter]

Hey there @b20tski; I'm sorry to jump in here, but have you tried an advanced reinstall yet?

Also, if you're on the Basic plan, can you let us know how many devices you've connected to your account?

[b20tski]

Hi @Walter, no problem, thanks for jumping in!

I have a basic plan, and removed all devices from my account yesterday. I had three signed in (including this computer with the issue).

Thanks for the link to the advanced reinstall. I just followed the steps you outlined for that, but unfortunately I'm still getting the same error message as before.

I have an interesting update. I just tried creating a new admin account and opened Dropbox from the Applications folder in that account. The login screen loaded just fine, no "Something went wrong" error. So, the problem is in my account only. Any ideas on what to do now?

Thanks.

[b20tski]

*Bump*, no suggestions?

I can't believe that there isn't a way to find out what's actually going on when Dropbox says "Something went wrong". Does anyone have any ideas? All I need is to know where to start looking, and I can probably fix the issue myself.

It's incredibly disappointing to have issues hidden from the user like this so that they're unable to fix them. Dropbox engineers, if you see this, please consider adding an *advanced* mode or something to let the user see what is actually going wrong when a message like "something went wrong" comes up. I'm sure it's just fine for most users, but for ones who get stuck (like myself) and have no way to get the app functioning, right about now I'd LOVE to know what's going on.

If there is ANY way for me to get around this "Something went wrong" error and actually SEE what is wrong so I can look into it, PLEASE let me know! This is so frustrating!

[Walter]

Sorry for the late response @b20tski.

If you were able to successfully install the Dropbox desktop application in the newly created profile, that means that there may be some sort of misconfiguration, setting, policy, or permission restriction that is affecting the original profile. 

Did you install our desktop app with admin privileges in the first place? 

[b20tski]

Hi @Walter,

thanks for your reply and suggestions. Yes, I'm the only user on my Mac, and it's an administrator account (as I suppose it has to be in that case), so an install with admin rights was done.

I suppose as the Dropbox install on the other admin account worked, I may need to move all of my data to a new account and see if that works. If you have any suggestions, please let me know, but that gives me a place to start.

Thanks

[b20tski · Accepted solution]

To close this out for anyone else facing a similar problem, to get Dropbox to reconnect *consistently* and work without any issue, I had to erase my Mac entirely and re-load everything from scratch (not a time machine restore, but a manual drag-and-drop copy of individual files and then manual re-installation of all applications). That fixed my issue.

Cheers.