Mastodon

It's Okay, Dropbox Will Support Apple Silicon

Posted by Matt Birchler
β€” 1 min read

From a feature request thread asking for a native version (July 2021):

This idea is going to need a bit more support before we share your suggestion with our team.

This got shared around a lot today, and it was followed up by this response from last month:

We are working to ensure that Dropbox, and all its features, continue to be fully compatible with all devices that run supported versions of MacOS. For the moment you will need to have Rosetta to run the Dropbox desktop client, on devices using Apple's new M1 processor.

I read this as Dropbox saying they don't think this is a crisis, the app still runs, and they'll make changes before Apple drops support for x86 apps. A product manager along the way surely said "don't give them a timeline since we don't know yet!" As someone who works in product, I get it, but agreed it's not a great look one year into the Apple Silicon age.

But then of course we got this from Dropbox CEO Drew Houston:

We've been working for a while on a native M1 build which we aim to release in H1 2022. (And agree the responses in the support thread were not ideal -- no need to upvote for this one πŸ™‚)

So yeah, it's taking too long, but it's coming. I'm truly baffled by the takes I saw that seemed to think Dropbox was never going to do this. It's way later than it should be, but at least we know it's coming.