I have the "Recents" tab missing - what is happening? Can you help?

[aszegedi]

My wife complains that on the iOS app, she now has tabs named "Home", "Files", "Photos", and "Offline". There used to be a "Recents" tab in place of "Home" that has now disappeared.

To make things stranger, on my phone and my Dropbox account, I still have "Recents", "Files", "Photos", and "Offline". Both our app versions are 52.2.2

To make things weirder, she has a "Hide Recents" button in app settings, and I don't. What gives? How can she restore the "Recents" tab in place of the "Home" tab?

[Mark]

Sounds like Dropbox may be doing some trials.

On the 'Home' tab on your wife's Dropbox when she goes there does it show you the Recents under that list? Mine does and its about three options down (Notifications, Starred and then Recents).

[aszegedi]

Hi Mark,

thanks for chiming in.

Yes, the new "Home" tab seems to be a HTML-ish view that does, among other things, have a "Recents" sheet in it, with a "View All >" link that gets her where she'd want to be. Still, it's confusing for her – hitting the "Recents" button in lower left corner was a one-tap gesture on a thumb-sized, fixed-location target (not to mention that the Dropbox app would actually open on Recents tab, so really, zero taps to get there).

She uses Dropbox a lot on mobile for her business productivity, and had a good effective routine for it involing starting from Recents, and it's been made noticeably worse…

[Rich]

---

aszegedi wrote:

had a good effective routine for it involing starting from Recents, and it's been made noticeably worse…

---

This is one to file under "you can't please everyone." Sooo many people complained about the Recents feature; that it defaulted to that tab, that there was no way to clear it, that it even existed, period. This was likely Dropbox's way to appease the masses.

Personally, I find it to be a great compromise between what it was originally and not having it at all.

[aszegedi]

Hi Rich,

while I can certainly agree that this falls into "can't please everyone" category, what made me ask for help here is that on my iPhone, there's still a Recents tab and on my wife's iPhone there's no Recents tab anymore even though we have the exact same app version installed (52.2.2), so I was hoping that there might be a tucked away setting somewhere, either in the app or on the website to bring it back. We might be subjects of an A/B testing instead…

[Rich · Accepted solution]

---

aszegedi wrote:

We might be subjects of an A/B testing instead…

---

You most likely are. Dropbox loves to test things like this with a small percentage of users first, and the applications are now built in a way that allows them to enable features for a subset of users.

There is no setting that controls this.