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DropBox app API usage

DropBox app API usage

User_1805491
New member | Level 2

So, we want to use DropBox to store some graphic assets of our app to reduce its size and let the users download more assets on demand. I do not care about the security of the assets at all (+ all access is read-only), so I plan to just use the generated API key directly in the app to communicate with DB in the background. Is this a valid approach/best practice? What are the rate limits? The assets are rather small (<50 MB in total), but I want it to scale well for high user counts.

1 Reply 1

Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff

The API was designed with the intention that each user would link their own Dropbox account, in order to interact with their own files. While it is technically possible to always connect to just one account for all users, we do not officially support this, for various technical and security reasons.

 

The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types, but we don't have specific rate numbers documented for that, and we cannot increase the limits for any particular app, user, or team. Apps should be written to handle these rate limit responses automatically. Also note that not all responses with a 429 or 503 status code indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a response with 429 or 503 status code the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. I recommend referring to the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.

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