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Re: Disable desktop notifications for app's folder

Disable desktop notifications for app's folder

Thomas
New member | Level 1

I'm using Dropbox Sync to write down small files to sync things in my iOS app. Because records and datastores are too limited in my case, I can't use Datastore. Unfortunately, these internal files are generating a lot of notifications on my desktop. It annoys the user. The solution is to disable sync of this folder on desktop computers, but it requires an additional step for the user (after having annoyed it). All of this is degrading user experience.

By nature, what happens inside an app folder is less likely to be of interest for an human user. It would be great if we were able to set our app folders as "notifications free" if relevant. One can also imagine per subfolder filtering. For now, my apps are mobile only, but if I want to make a desktop version and use Dropbox to sync stuffs, disabling app's folder sync will be impossible and users would have to live with dozens of garbage notifications. It would be so awful that it would prevent me to use Dropbox at all to sync with a desktop version (even if user would like to use Dropbox).

37 Replies 37

Joe C.56
Helpful | Level 7

Thanks for passing along the mute Apps folder request, Gregory. Much appreciated.

Thomas
New member | Level 1

Thanks for the clarification Gregory. Since it can be done with the mute parameter, I don't see the necessity to globally mute App's folder notifications so as far as I'm concerned, the issue is solved.

Joe C.56
Helpful | Level 7

Thomas, the reason for the global mute request is for the sake of the user. While thoughtful devs like you will now code your app that way, most others haven't. So it'd be nice to be able to just mute that whole folder (and others selectively in the future) so that we don't have to wait for devs to include such functionality in their apps.

That request is still important to users of Dropbox, but it just got mixed in with your original question because no one else had a topic for it at the time in the user forum.

Jan_Zeman
Helpful | Level 6

Hi @Joe C., thank you very much for putting you energy into this and also a clear separation of the 2 possible solutions. I am not on V2 yet and unfortunately have no capacity to move to it within the foreseeable short time.  I totally agree with your last sentence saying that it is not the most efficient solution to wait for all the developers to discover this problem, update to v2 and add the mute parameter. Plus consider the scenario of 3rd party libraries released as NuGet packages. If their owners do not do the proper update then poor the final dev users who took the dependency... That is the other reason I plead for the more robust solution - the one that makes all the APPS folder notifications silent. I explained number of time why I think it totally makes sense and you seem to agree to it. Gregory claims it is not an easy change, I have a hard time believing so to be quite honest as I have used notification in number of products I have worked on. Is there any chance I can open this topic on a non-API related forum, so I get the chance to observe the progress? I would be very thankful if you point me to such a place. Thank you very much in advance, Jan

Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff

Jan, there's a Product Feedback section of the forum for leaving feedback for Dropbox in general, as opposed to for the API in particular.

Joe C.56
Helpful | Level 7

Jan_Zeman
Helpful | Level 6

Great, thank you, Gregory and Joe.

GlynDavies
Helpful | Level 5

Absolutely! I use ClipaVu intensively across a couple of computers ( it's great to have my clipboard synchronised, so that I can clip from one computer and later paste onto another. However, whenever I [Ctrl]+c I receive a flurry of useless and annoying notifications about files with random names being saved in Dropbox. These notifications are merely data, not information. Muting them would be wonderful!

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