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I don't understand why Dropbox has to do all this. Can't they just manage all files by themselves? Just open and close files like any program. No need to use wh

I don't understand why Dropbox has to do all this. Can't they just manage all files by themselves? Just open and close files like any program. No need to use whatever new bs API apple is pushing. This is macos, not iOS. You can still run any turing complete software. Or am I mistaken with that assumption?

wtallis 4y ago
It seems like Dropbox of today is trying to be a completely different tool than what Dropbox originally was. Their goal is no longer to sync files that reside on a folder on your machines, but instead to store files primarily in the cloud and present the illusion that they reside on your machine. Apparently the Apple API for doing the latter comes with restrictions that make it more obvious that Dropbox has abandoned its original purpose. Personally, I like the idea of forcing files that don't really exist on my machine to be presented through a different UI and namespace than files that are actually locally available. A complicated overlay mount of a network filesystem and a local caching layer is not something that should be shoehorned into an unsuspecting user's home directory. It's trying to present an abstraction that has too many pitfalls.
systoll 4y ago
Prior to 2016, the dropbox app managed which files were synced with your filesystem, and you could always go into the Dropbox app to see the files that weren't synced. As of 2016, dropbox started to intercept calls to open/move/delete files at the kernel level – https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-project-infinite https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-projec... – this allowed them to create proxies for all the files that weren’t synced, and to then download them whenever something tried to open them. The API they used for that was always intended for Antivirus and similar programs, but it worked. Apple replaced that API with a new one which is a lot more narrowly targeted to Antivirus, and dropbox couldn’t use it. Dropbox could try and do things without any API, but they’d get themselves kicked off the App Store, they’d need to convince users to turn off 'System Integrity Protection' which would try to keep the OS kernel unmodified, and their implementation would be prone to breaking at any time. Just managing the files by themselves would essentially be going back to the pre-2016 approach, and the file provider API is better than that.

wtallis 4y ago

It seems like Dropbox of today is trying to be a completely different tool than what Dropbox originally was. Their goal is no longer to sync files that reside on a folder on your machines, but instead to store files primarily in the cloud and present the illusion that they reside on your machine. Apparently the Apple API for doing the latter comes with restrictions that make it more obvious that Dropbox has abandoned its original purpose. Personally, I like the idea of forcing files that don't really exist on my machine to be presented through a different UI and namespace than files that are actually locally available. A complicated overlay mount of a network filesystem and a local caching layer is not something that should be shoehorned into an unsuspecting user's home directory. It's trying to present an abstraction that has too many pitfalls.

systoll 4y ago

Prior to 2016, the dropbox app managed which files were synced with your filesystem, and you could always go into the Dropbox app to see the files that weren't synced. As of 2016, dropbox started to intercept calls to open/move/delete files at the kernel level – https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-project-infinite https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/going-deeper-with-projec... – this allowed them to create proxies for all the files that weren’t synced, and to then download them whenever something tried to open them. The API they used for that was always intended for Antivirus and similar programs, but it worked. Apple replaced that API with a new one which is a lot more narrowly targeted to Antivirus, and dropbox couldn’t use it. Dropbox could try and do things without any API, but they’d get themselves kicked off the App Store, they’d need to convince users to turn off 'System Integrity Protection' which would try to keep the OS kernel unmodified, and their implementation would be prone to breaking at any time. Just managing the files by themselves would essentially be going back to the pre-2016 approach, and the file provider API is better than that.