Android App not uploading photos anymore

[D K.7]

Paid dropbox account, Samsung S4

Dropbox app on android device no longer uploads photos.  Trying clearing cache on android device, no luck

[Håvard D.]

The issue here is not related to background uploading, but uploading photos even when the app is active and the screen is on so turning off power save for the app does not help.

To add some more information here are the troubleshooting steps I have taken when photo upload stopped working:

- Turning camera uploads off and on again

- Setting the setting to wifi only and turning on wifi (was set to wifi and data plan)

- Setting it to photos only

- Setting the battery percentage to greater than 10% (phone connected to power and at 100% battery)

- Revoking all of the apps accesses and reenabling them again

- Give the app high priority and disabling all power saving features, setting display to never turn off and connecting to power leaving it for 1 hour (both wifi and mobile data)

- Uninstalling and reinstalling the app itself (this is what ultimately solved the issue for a while)

I have also looked and tried the steps outlined in the support document regarding photo uploads here: https://help.dropbox.com/photos-videos/camera-uploads-fix

TicketID: 7577248  @Sanchez

[Sanchez]

@kirksel, I’m glad to hear that! Thanks for coming back and letting us know. Is your Note 8 running Android 7 (Nougat) or 8 (Oreo)? 

Havard, thanks for the details. I’ve looked up your ticket, and made sure it’s in the right queue for review. A member of our team will be in contact with you as soon as possible. 

Have a great weekend! 

[Brandon B.1]

After buying Google Drive & Sync and trying that for a couple of weeks, I am back to using Dropbox. Drobox has the annoying bug where it doesn't upload photos from Android unless you are actively looking at the Dropbox app, but Google Drive & Sync creates multiple duplicates of folders and files, adding (1), (2), (3), (4), etc. And then if you delete the duplicates, it duplicates the original! The Android bug is annoying, but at least Dropbox syncs correctly and doesn't delete my files!

I just hope they fix this Android bug some day.

[Maxbbb99]

Yes this worked for me. Thanks.

[Esch]

I wanted to chime in on this issue as well. I've had this problem for a long time and even after upgrading my phone to an Android Pixel One and installing the app when the phone was brand new, the problem persisted.

Someone above mentioned about going into the battery setting and adding the app there. I am running Android Pie (version 9.x) and I went into my battery settings to find that I couldn't add any app, but by turning off the "adaptive battery" setting, that did the trick. I shot several test photos and they instantly were uploaded into my dropbox account.

So for the Dropbox tech/mods here, seems like the problem everyone is having has something to do with adaptive battery or something that is forcing the app to go idle in the background to save battery power that is causing this issue. This feature has been in the last 1-2 (?) versions of the OS, which coincides with when I started having problems.

E

[trog]

I'm also having this problem (latest Dropbox app running on up-to-date Android v8.1.0 Nexus 5X).

I just tried disabling battery optimisation for the Dropbox app and so far it seems to have made a difference; photos are uploading again.

I think it is related to the outbound bandwidth of my network getting flooded and it causing the Dropbox application to maybe timeout when it is uploading chunks of data - I'm not sure how the battery optimisation stuff works but I can imagine that an application constantly resending data or experiencing timeouts might have its background processes killed off by the battery monitor regularly to save battery power.

I can see the file upload progress bar getting updated; sometimes it seems to go backward (perhaps a chunk that was getting uploaded timed out and needed to be retried?). While watching this I can see my network is constantly pushing out bytes, flooding the upstream.

I /only/ have this problem on my home network where my upload speed is limited to 1Mbps. When the upstream is flooded, the Internet becomes almost unusable - websites will even timeout on my desktop PC. On other, faster networks (e.g., at parent's house), the files upload as normal, I assume because the upstream there is much greater.

Unfortunately my modem is too simply to allow me to attempt to limit the upstream over wifi. I've tried setting QoS but it doesn't make a difference.

I would note I also sync to Google Photos. This works fine; while it does have a big impact on my network it doesn't seem to flood it as badly. I can only guess that they have some smarts in their application that detects an issue (e.g., if latency goes up to the server, if there are many retries for the same data chunk, etc) and assumes that means the link is choked, and then backs off the upload rate a little bit?

Not sure if this thread is monitored by Dropbox staff, but it would be awesome to add functionality to limit upload speed in the mobile app, similar to what exists in the desktop version. I use this feature all the time to manage my link health on my desktop. Even if this uploading issue is fixed, I still will have to leave Dropbox mobile sync off because it renders my network mostly inoperable while uploading.

Happy to help diagnose further, but if anyone is having this problem and has the ability to throttle their upload speeds to see if that fixes it I'd be super interested in the result.

Thanks!