Re:Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor ...
by saurik on Sunday June 13, 2021 @03:02AM
(#27490440)
The entire concept of how the files app works and integrates indirectly with everything on iOS is effectively a stand-in replacement--maybe a better one for some use cases, for sure, but that seems besides the point--to Dropbox. This is because iOS ostensibly doesn't really want to have a file system, and so the concept of storing things into the Files app--which is the interface for and is largely backed by iCloud Drive, which is 100% a competitor to Dropbox--is about as weirdly indirect as storing something into Dropbox. I would thereby think that, in fact, a number of people looking for Dropbox's functionality--to share files between apps on their phone and store them in the cloud--might get tempted to use Files instead to accomplish that exact same core use case.
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Re:Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor ...
by dwaite on Sunday June 13, 2021 @10:45PM
(#27498741)
Files takes an extension (plugin) approach to files, and is decidedly non-Posix since it was focused on supporting remote/slow file sources first.
iCloud, WebDAV and CIFS (as well as On Your <device>) are examples of support that Apple ships first party, while third party extensions include Dropbox and OneDrive as well as more exotic things like emulator file systems (iSH) and SSHFS.
Before Files came out, every app that wanted to integrate with DropBox had to ship a dropbox SDK which included people logging into dropbox through each app, individual developer API tokens, etc.
Now the user just installs Dropbox and it works.
The challenge for Dropbox has and continues to be being a product and not a feature (with a nod to Steve jobs).