Their only feature which necessitated that, as far as I know, was the sync status badge display which is hardly necessary to the product.
Seamless "filesystem integration" -- which includes the Finder badging -- was central to what made Dropbox a novel product.
It's also a very useful feature that served people well.
Their filesystem integration would have been just as seamless without the badging. I admit the badging is a useful feature, and certainly made Dropbox better but by no means is it core to the product.
Re:How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
by Blaisorblade0 on Friday September 16, 2016 @07:30AM
(#12513262)
You're talking past each other — other, more fundamental features used to require hacking OS X.
See for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467149. IIRC ArsTechnica wrote at some point that monkey-patching Mac OS/Mac OS X was standard on the platform.
There was no other way to do what they did. The only reason Apple added API was because Dropbox came up with an idea that demonstrated the need for such an API to exist.