7 ms·

Dropbox Sync does not natively support Apple Silicon

52 points by jen20 5y ago

jasonsync 5y ago
Looking for a Dropbox alternative? We were M1 native at launch (https://www.Sync.com https://www.Sync.com).
- drcongo 5y ago
  I used to be a paying customer of Sync and hated every single thing about it I'm afraid. The web interface was so painfully slow to use that a simple file share task would take 10 minutes of waiting for things to load or, as was most often the case, fail to load.
- gaius_baltar 5y ago
  Exchanging a problem for another. SyncThing ( https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ ) is the definitive solution: free software, peer to peer and no data leaking anywhere.
jabedude 5y ago
I think this has been reposted several times within the last 24 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29018650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29018650
- jen20 5y ago
  My experience in the past has been that HN de-dupes links on submission. Perhaps that is not the case.
xd1936 5y ago
Who cares? For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
- capableweb 5y ago
  For people who might miss that this is basically a HN copy-pasta at this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - April 5, 2007 In general, not sure if we should keep posting this about every Dropbox mention. Comments like this is hardly intellectually stimulating and might fit better at Reddit rather than HN.
  - simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    I agree. It was funny once or twice, but at this point I'd rather not see comments like the parent comment on hacker news.
    - mft_ 5y ago
      ‘In jokes’ or ‘running jokes’ can be quite valuable as part of a shared culture, for a sense of belonging. I smiled.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    I think it’s a good example for people who haven’t seen it before.
    - krisrm 5y ago
      Agreed, I hadn't seen anything on this subject before and wasn't aware it was a copypasta response. I get that hn doesn't want to turn into the cesspool of inside jokes that reddit has become, but a quick jab like this here and there never hurts, imo
  - 5y ago
joshstrange 5y ago
When I get my first M1 mac tomorrow I think I'm going to try using Maestral as my dropbox client. Does anyone else have experience using this and what are your thoughts? [0] https://maestral.app/ https://maestral.app/
- egze 5y ago
  Using it and it works quite well. No issues so far.
  - steviedotboston 5y ago
    Same. Very lightweight, does its job.
- planb 5y ago
  I did the same and it is working fine. There’s just 3 things that are missing in maestral if you don‘t care for the productivity stuff like comments etc.: 1) No overlay icons in the finder (see https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral/issues/443 https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral/issues/443) 2) No incremental sync for large files where just a few blocks change (the API does not provide this) 3) No support for extended file attributes (so you cannot sync .app bundles)
- orangea 5y ago
  Does it use the file provider api or something similar? Or does it just download everything whenever it changes?
ianhawes 5y ago
This and the (apparent) issues with running React Native SDK on the new Apple chips are very concerning. I have a few weeks until mine is delivered but I’m hoping these things are resolved by then. Is there a list of major devtools not functional on Apple Silicon?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Not sure why people are downvoting you for a completely legitimate question. There is a list of apps that are not ready for Apple silicon[0], and probably quite a few more that I'm not aware of. [0] https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/developer https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/developer
  - ThaJay 5y ago
    Apple messed up and that makes me happy
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I could really care less, but as a developer I'm not buying a laptop without Vulkan support. It's a little silly that Apple can even market it as 'Pro' without support for the graphics API that pros actually use.
zzzeek 5y ago
why do commercial software vendors even have a delay with this kind of thing? I would assume software written in C which isn't doing any dark magic with opcodes can normally just be compiled to the new platform without any major hurdles? or is there some kind of "dropbox has to pay Apple huge license fee for X" kind of thing going on ?
- otterley 5y ago
  The short, simple answer is that pretty much every successful business has a combination of a shortage of technical resources and a priority list of things that matter to their customers. Some initiatives just don't get top priority at a given point in time. I can totally see why Dropbox might not prioritize this work right now because as of this moment, the client works as-is on M1 Macs.
- Oddskar 5y ago
  Some potential answers: * Original programmer has since moved on, and as per industry standard there was no hand-off and code is poorly documented * The team in charge of this is busy delivering features/fixing bugs for whale clients * The product organisation down prioritizes it because the PM wants to build a shiny thing that gets them promoted
- tyingq 5y ago
  They may be considering whether they should have separate downloads or a smart installer/runtime that figures out what to install/run for MacOS. Separate downloads would be close(ish) to what you're describing, but would drive support issues for some users. A smart installer would be new code, maybe.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  The simple fact is that, unsurprisingly, a lot of devs don't care. Apple can lead a horse to water, but they ultimately can't make them drink. By chasing such a radical paradigm shift with their new computers, there are inevitably going to be developers who get thrown under the bus without chance for recourse. Look at Valve's Proton project, which was intended to support MacOS just as well as Linux for near-perfect translation of DirectX games. When they started transitioning to ARM, they threw away so many system-side libraries and OS interfaces that Valve simply had to scrap the version altogether, since the amount of work required to get it working on Mac would be astronomically higher than the effort it takes to maintain it on Linux. I'm trying to remain impartial here, but so long as the majority of the desktop market share stays on x86, there won't really be much financial incentive for developers to port things to ARM. We had the same issue a decade ago when the Raspberry Pi hit markets, with hardly enough software to get it running desktop Linux. Fast forward to today, and people still don't really care all that much.
otterley 5y ago
I’m curious as to what the data actually shows about the client “annihilating the battery” when run under Rosetta translation, as opposed to a mere unsupported declaration/assumption that it does.
- cageface 5y ago
  I've been running it on an M1 for quite a while now. At least while it's mostly idle I haven't noticed any effect on the battery. If you do a lot of syncing every day you might see more of an effect I guess.
fabianhjr 5y ago
s/Apple Silicon/ARMv8 AArch64/ A lot of times it is due to direct or indirect dependencies. Before the M1 there weren't many ARMv8 AArch64 users. Only a couple of distros starting providing ARMv8 AArch recently and even then not a lot of their packages could be built for that target.
- planb 5y ago
  The Dropbox client exists for iOS and writings were on the wall that macs would switch to arm. This is simply a sign of wrong priorities.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Dropbox for iOS and Desktops are very different applications.
    - planb 5y ago
      That does not change the fact that Dropbox could have made the Mac UI easy to port as soon as it was foreseeable that apple eventually will go arm only. So they had at least 2 years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fulafel 5y ago
  It's the most common Android platform, so has a lot of users overall.
  - fabianhjr 5y ago
    Most Android development targets java bytecode targeting the Android Runtime which uses an OpenJDK VM/Runtime (Previously Apache Harmony) Hardly translatable to most non-java software on distros.
- user-the-name 5y ago
reacharavindh 5y ago
I started using MountainDuck and use Backblaze B2 as a storage provider. It helps me keep some stuff locally(and synced to B2) while other stuff only on B2 with the ability to simply pull down on demand. So far, it’s been great. Although I’m still on intel Mac. Don’t know whether they support M1 yet. Looks like they do. https://mountainduck.io/ https://mountainduck.io/
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  No M1 for MountainDuck yet..
tyingq 5y ago
It wasn't that long ago that the dropbox sync client was python. So, still odd, but I am curious how much of an effect dropbox sync running on rosetta has.
999900000999 5y ago
I'm confused, because I have Dropbox installed on my m1 Mac and it works fine. Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? For something that only has to Sync files do I really need the full power of an m1 processor. Even if it's running slower by the emulation layer, I was not able to notice anything. I even did a bit of stress testing where I was editing a text file in two places at once to see what happened, and Dropbox synced everything within seconds.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  > Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? Yes, this is such a non-issue.
  - arcatech 5y ago
    Except for the fact that the app running under Rosetta is extremely resource intensive and drains the laptop battery.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      It did the same for me on my Intel MacBook. It's long been uninstalled now.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? In my experience: yes. Photoshop under Rosetta (before their Apple Silicon release) was faster on my M1 than it was on my old 2016 MBP, despite the emulation.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    M1 hardware is just incredible.
- hartator 5y ago
  > Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? Yes! It’s 100% Intel code being emulated or transcribed. You can see which is which in your Activity Monitor.
akmarinov 5y ago
This is a support person that probably's not that familiar with Dropbox's technical and management roadmap. Not having Apple Silicon support means that they're effectively telling everyone "we won't support Macs" in 5 years. Apple will kill Rosetta 2 at some point, just like they did with Rosetta 1 and my bet is sooner rather than later. If Dropbox doesn't support Macs, they seem to think that the work to bring Dropbox to Apple Silicon will be more expensive than the revenue they get from Mac users. With all that - Dropbox does have some technical issues at the kernel layer that they need to address with Apple and that's also something that a support person can't really know.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >Apple will kill Rosetta 2 at some point, just like they did with Rosetta 1 and my bet is sooner rather than later. The original version of Rosetta was based on QuickTransit and licensed from Transitive, so Apple paid for every version of MacOS that included it. This version of Rosetta was created in-house instead of licensed from a third party, so there is no cost benefit to dropping it quickly.
hs86 5y ago
My guess: Porting their kernel extension to ARM is not that trivial. They were one of the first who offered these 0-byte placeholders, and they rely on a kernel driver, which is only available on both Windows and macOS (but not Linux). OneDrive [0] and Box [1] are moving away from their implementations and switching to Apple's File Provider API. Their motive might be less development effort, and the official API might be good enough. Still, I wonder whether the deprecation of 3rd party kernel extensions might also be a reason to switch to such a "thin client". Interestingly, Apple did something similar on Windows [2]: They are now using Microsoft's OneDrive implementation for their iCloud file sync client. Now I am wondering what Dropbox will do. Is maintaining their kernel extension still feasible on macOS? [0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/microsoft-works-to-ensure-a-great-onedrive-experience-on-apple/ba-p/2400803 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl... [1] https://blog.box.com/get-more-secure-seamless-box-drive-experience-across-macs https://blog.box.com/get-more-secure-seamless-box-drive-expe... [2] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apples-all-new-icloud-for-windows-app-now-available-in-the-microsoft-store https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apple...
- lampington 5y ago
  I'm a tad confused. I use Dropbox on Linux and it works fine. Is there something I'm missing?
  - hs86 5y ago
    This feature is not available on Linux: https://www.dropbox.com/en/smart-sync https://www.dropbox.com/en/smart-sync
jbverschoor 5y ago
> Dropbox currently supports Apple M1 through Rosetta. We have an internal build for native Apple M1 support, which we're currently testing and we’re committed to releasing in the first half of 2022. While we regularly ask for customer feedback and input on new products or features, this should not have been one of those instances. source: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-ideas/Apple-Silicon-M1-Desktop-Sync-Compatibility/idc-p/553669/highlight/true#M64135 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-ideas/Apple-Silicon-... Does anybody really believe this?

52 points by jen20 5y ago

jasonsync 5y ago

Looking for a Dropbox alternative? We were M1 native at launch (https://www.Sync.com https://www.Sync.com).

drcongo 5y ago
I used to be a paying customer of Sync and hated every single thing about it I'm afraid. The web interface was so painfully slow to use that a simple file share task would take 10 minutes of waiting for things to load or, as was most often the case, fail to load.
gaius_baltar 5y ago
Exchanging a problem for another. SyncThing ( https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ ) is the definitive solution: free software, peer to peer and no data leaking anywhere.

jabedude 5y ago

I think this has been reposted several times within the last 24 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29018650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29018650

jen20 5y ago
My experience in the past has been that HN de-dupes links on submission. Perhaps that is not the case.

xd1936 5y ago

Who cares? For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

capableweb 5y ago
For people who might miss that this is basically a HN copy-pasta at this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - April 5, 2007 In general, not sure if we should keep posting this about every Dropbox mention. Comments like this is hardly intellectually stimulating and might fit better at Reddit rather than HN.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  I agree. It was funny once or twice, but at this point I'd rather not see comments like the parent comment on hacker news.
  - mft_ 5y ago
    ‘In jokes’ or ‘running jokes’ can be quite valuable as part of a shared culture, for a sense of belonging. I smiled.
- rajin444 5y ago
  I think it’s a good example for people who haven’t seen it before.
  - krisrm 5y ago
    Agreed, I hadn't seen anything on this subject before and wasn't aware it was a copypasta response. I get that hn doesn't want to turn into the cesspool of inside jokes that reddit has become, but a quick jab like this here and there never hurts, imo
- 5y ago

joshstrange 5y ago

When I get my first M1 mac tomorrow I think I'm going to try using Maestral as my dropbox client. Does anyone else have experience using this and what are your thoughts? [0] https://maestral.app/ https://maestral.app/

egze 5y ago
Using it and it works quite well. No issues so far.
- steviedotboston 5y ago
  Same. Very lightweight, does its job.
planb 5y ago
I did the same and it is working fine. There’s just 3 things that are missing in maestral if you don‘t care for the productivity stuff like comments etc.: 1) No overlay icons in the finder (see https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral/issues/443 https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral/issues/443) 2) No incremental sync for large files where just a few blocks change (the API does not provide this) 3) No support for extended file attributes (so you cannot sync .app bundles)
orangea 5y ago
Does it use the file provider api or something similar? Or does it just download everything whenever it changes?

ianhawes 5y ago

This and the (apparent) issues with running React Native SDK on the new Apple chips are very concerning. I have a few weeks until mine is delivered but I’m hoping these things are resolved by then. Is there a list of major devtools not functional on Apple Silicon?

smoldesu 5y ago
Not sure why people are downvoting you for a completely legitimate question. There is a list of apps that are not ready for Apple silicon[0], and probably quite a few more that I'm not aware of. [0] https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/developer https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/developer
- ThaJay 5y ago
  Apple messed up and that makes me happy
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I could really care less, but as a developer I'm not buying a laptop without Vulkan support. It's a little silly that Apple can even market it as 'Pro' without support for the graphics API that pros actually use.

zzzeek 5y ago

why do commercial software vendors even have a delay with this kind of thing? I would assume software written in C which isn't doing any dark magic with opcodes can normally just be compiled to the new platform without any major hurdles? or is there some kind of "dropbox has to pay Apple huge license fee for X" kind of thing going on ?

otterley 5y ago
The short, simple answer is that pretty much every successful business has a combination of a shortage of technical resources and a priority list of things that matter to their customers. Some initiatives just don't get top priority at a given point in time. I can totally see why Dropbox might not prioritize this work right now because as of this moment, the client works as-is on M1 Macs.
Oddskar 5y ago
Some potential answers: * Original programmer has since moved on, and as per industry standard there was no hand-off and code is poorly documented * The team in charge of this is busy delivering features/fixing bugs for whale clients * The product organisation down prioritizes it because the PM wants to build a shiny thing that gets them promoted
tyingq 5y ago
They may be considering whether they should have separate downloads or a smart installer/runtime that figures out what to install/run for MacOS. Separate downloads would be close(ish) to what you're describing, but would drive support issues for some users. A smart installer would be new code, maybe.
smoldesu 5y ago
The simple fact is that, unsurprisingly, a lot of devs don't care. Apple can lead a horse to water, but they ultimately can't make them drink. By chasing such a radical paradigm shift with their new computers, there are inevitably going to be developers who get thrown under the bus without chance for recourse. Look at Valve's Proton project, which was intended to support MacOS just as well as Linux for near-perfect translation of DirectX games. When they started transitioning to ARM, they threw away so many system-side libraries and OS interfaces that Valve simply had to scrap the version altogether, since the amount of work required to get it working on Mac would be astronomically higher than the effort it takes to maintain it on Linux. I'm trying to remain impartial here, but so long as the majority of the desktop market share stays on x86, there won't really be much financial incentive for developers to port things to ARM. We had the same issue a decade ago when the Raspberry Pi hit markets, with hardly enough software to get it running desktop Linux. Fast forward to today, and people still don't really care all that much.

otterley 5y ago

I’m curious as to what the data actually shows about the client “annihilating the battery” when run under Rosetta translation, as opposed to a mere unsupported declaration/assumption that it does.

cageface 5y ago
I've been running it on an M1 for quite a while now. At least while it's mostly idle I haven't noticed any effect on the battery. If you do a lot of syncing every day you might see more of an effect I guess.

fabianhjr 5y ago

s/Apple Silicon/ARMv8 AArch64/ A lot of times it is due to direct or indirect dependencies. Before the M1 there weren't many ARMv8 AArch64 users. Only a couple of distros starting providing ARMv8 AArch recently and even then not a lot of their packages could be built for that target.

planb 5y ago
The Dropbox client exists for iOS and writings were on the wall that macs would switch to arm. This is simply a sign of wrong priorities.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Dropbox for iOS and Desktops are very different applications.
  - planb 5y ago
    That does not change the fact that Dropbox could have made the Mac UI easy to port as soon as it was foreseeable that apple eventually will go arm only. So they had at least 2 years.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fulafel 5y ago
It's the most common Android platform, so has a lot of users overall.
- fabianhjr 5y ago
  Most Android development targets java bytecode targeting the Android Runtime which uses an OpenJDK VM/Runtime (Previously Apache Harmony) Hardly translatable to most non-java software on distros.
user-the-name 5y ago

reacharavindh 5y ago

I started using MountainDuck and use Backblaze B2 as a storage provider. It helps me keep some stuff locally(and synced to B2) while other stuff only on B2 with the ability to simply pull down on demand. So far, it’s been great. Although I’m still on intel Mac. Don’t know whether they support M1 yet. Looks like they do. https://mountainduck.io/ https://mountainduck.io/

jbverschoor 5y ago
No M1 for MountainDuck yet..

tyingq 5y ago

It wasn't that long ago that the dropbox sync client was python. So, still odd, but I am curious how much of an effect dropbox sync running on rosetta has.

999900000999 5y ago

I'm confused, because I have Dropbox installed on my m1 Mac and it works fine. Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? For something that only has to Sync files do I really need the full power of an m1 processor. Even if it's running slower by the emulation layer, I was not able to notice anything. I even did a bit of stress testing where I was editing a text file in two places at once to see what happened, and Dropbox synced everything within seconds.

jonny_eh 5y ago
> Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? Yes, this is such a non-issue.
- arcatech 5y ago
  Except for the fact that the app running under Rosetta is extremely resource intensive and drains the laptop battery.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    It did the same for me on my Intel MacBook. It's long been uninstalled now.
ceejayoz 5y ago
> Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? In my experience: yes. Photoshop under Rosetta (before their Apple Silicon release) was faster on my M1 than it was on my old 2016 MBP, despite the emulation.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  M1 hardware is just incredible.
hartator 5y ago
> Is Rosetta that transparent that I just didn't notice? Yes! It’s 100% Intel code being emulated or transcribed. You can see which is which in your Activity Monitor.

akmarinov 5y ago

This is a support person that probably's not that familiar with Dropbox's technical and management roadmap. Not having Apple Silicon support means that they're effectively telling everyone "we won't support Macs" in 5 years. Apple will kill Rosetta 2 at some point, just like they did with Rosetta 1 and my bet is sooner rather than later. If Dropbox doesn't support Macs, they seem to think that the work to bring Dropbox to Apple Silicon will be more expensive than the revenue they get from Mac users. With all that - Dropbox does have some technical issues at the kernel layer that they need to address with Apple and that's also something that a support person can't really know.

GeekyBear 5y ago
>Apple will kill Rosetta 2 at some point, just like they did with Rosetta 1 and my bet is sooner rather than later. The original version of Rosetta was based on QuickTransit and licensed from Transitive, so Apple paid for every version of MacOS that included it. This version of Rosetta was created in-house instead of licensed from a third party, so there is no cost benefit to dropping it quickly.

hs86 5y ago

My guess: Porting their kernel extension to ARM is not that trivial. They were one of the first who offered these 0-byte placeholders, and they rely on a kernel driver, which is only available on both Windows and macOS (but not Linux). OneDrive [0] and Box [1] are moving away from their implementations and switching to Apple's File Provider API. Their motive might be less development effort, and the official API might be good enough. Still, I wonder whether the deprecation of 3rd party kernel extensions might also be a reason to switch to such a "thin client". Interestingly, Apple did something similar on Windows [2]: They are now using Microsoft's OneDrive implementation for their iCloud file sync client. Now I am wondering what Dropbox will do. Is maintaining their kernel extension still feasible on macOS? [0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-blog/microsoft-works-to-ensure-a-great-onedrive-experience-on-apple/ba-p/2400803 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl... [1] https://blog.box.com/get-more-secure-seamless-box-drive-experience-across-macs https://blog.box.com/get-more-secure-seamless-box-drive-expe... [2] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apples-all-new-icloud-for-windows-app-now-available-in-the-microsoft-store https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apple...

lampington 5y ago
I'm a tad confused. I use Dropbox on Linux and it works fine. Is there something I'm missing?
- hs86 5y ago
  This feature is not available on Linux: https://www.dropbox.com/en/smart-sync https://www.dropbox.com/en/smart-sync

jbverschoor 5y ago

> Dropbox currently supports Apple M1 through Rosetta. We have an internal build for native Apple M1 support, which we're currently testing and we’re committed to releasing in the first half of 2022. While we regularly ask for customer feedback and input on new products or features, this should not have been one of those instances. source: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-ideas/Apple-Silicon-M1-Desktop-Sync-Compatibility/idc-p/553669/highlight/true#M64135 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-ideas/Apple-Silicon-... Does anybody really believe this?