Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile

https://cloudrail.com/cloud-storage-report-dropbox-owns-cloud-storage-mobile/

by droidz • 10 years ago

88 79 10 years ago

larrik• 10 years ago

From among CloudRail powered mobile apps. Meaning iCloud isn't considered at all. Interesting finding, but needs an asterisk.

droidz5• 10 years ago

True! It is just among Dropbox GoogleDrive Box OneDrive. Also Egnyte is not considered (or just too small?) even it is supported by cloudrail.

0xCMP2• 10 years ago

Yea, but lets say we just pick iOS users, how do you tell they use iCloud over Dropbox when some things do not give a choice? This is probably as good as we're gonna get from a third-party.

droidz5• 10 years ago

I guess every iOS user uses iCloud somehow. But for me it's just backup because it is so limited to the Apple world. Do they even have a public API?

niftich3• 10 years ago

I don't claim to represent the average app developer but I've never so much as heard of CloudRail, them claiming to be a "Unified API integration leader" and all. I can't find them being written about by someone like Gartner; some other sources claim that they're a European startup in the IoT integration space.

I guess I'm not sure what to make of some unknown-to-me company's study on usage of its own SDK for cloud storage; and this study being posted in 'news release'-style on their blog. To me, these are huge grains of salt.

droidz5• 10 years ago

I've heard of them before a couple times but frankly, I don't know how good the source is. Just considered it interesting and I'm a Dropbox only user as well.

RachelF• 10 years ago

I looked at CloudRail, but the Dropbox and Google Drive API's are pretty easy to use.

Adding this layer of middleware is just another layer of complexity for us.

duaneb• 10 years ago

Does iCloud even allow storing arbitrary files? I can't even figure out how to drag and drop a file from my mac to the icloud drive, let alone retrieve it from the iOS side.

I don't think you can compare iCloud with general purpose storage; it seems angled towards iOS app integrations instead.

olentangy• 10 years ago

Um, it's trivial to drag any file on a Mac into iCloud. Look in the sidebar in the Finder, between Favorites and Devices is iCloud. Click there to see the contents of your iCloud storage.

On iOS, the iCloud Drive app lets you see everything in iCloud storage as well.

Certainly iOS app integration is important in iCloud, but it functions perfectly well for any other use too.

mattkevan• 10 years ago

macOS Sierra syncs the desktop and documents folders across all your Macs and makes the files available in the iOS iCloud Drive app as well.

It's really handy - I've pretty much stopped using Dropbox, except to share files with people on other platforms.

With a few (and lessening) limitations, iCloud is becoming the general user-accessible filesystem that iOS has lacked since the beginning.

All that's needed now is a download manager in safari.

clumsysmurf• 10 years ago

I hope on Android they support SAF (Storage Access Framework) soon. Since I don't want to include N cloud SDKs for each point-to-point integration, my app only supports what SAF does -- and sadly dropbox support is missing.

droidz5• 10 years ago

isn't that what cloudrail claims to provide?

hh2222• 10 years ago

It would be awesome if they put a simple text editor in their IOS and web app.

Wintamute• 10 years ago

I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive.

Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the free accounts and the accounts that max out their paid storage.

I don't know why people put up with it?

izacus• 10 years ago

Because it's the only cloud provider that has reliable cross-platform syncing solution and works extremely well?

As soon as you try their competitors (Drive, Box, iCloud) you find out just how utterly crappy they are as soon as you need to share files with other people. Dropbox does it seamlessly. Bankrolling free accounts so students can have their thesis backed up is a small price to pay for that.

jakebasile• 10 years ago

Dropbox's pricing is indeed frustrating, on both ends of the spectrum. Small time users pay a lot more than competitors so they can store a reasonable amount, and if you want to store a lot of stuff you're shit out of luck as the only option is to get their "team" storage which has more stuff than a single user needs. I don't even really need sharing, I can send stuff via email or other methods for that - I want personal file syncing.

I've been using iCloud Drive recently, and it works pretty well. Maybe if Apple ever gets around to releasing new Macs they'll bump the default storage level and cover more people because as it stands it's at 5GB which isn't competitive anymore.

yid• 10 years ago

I don't know why people put up with it?

Lock-in? Once you have a few gigs up on Dropbox, it's a bit of a challenge transferring it elsewhere.

rootusrootus2• 10 years ago

I disagree. As a long time paying Dropbox customer, I reevaluate each year, including copying all my data over to a competing provider to see how it shakes out. For all the big providers it's drag and drop. So far what keeps me coming back to Dropbox is that the other solutions have sync reliability issues on one or more of the platforms I use (we're a diverse family, with everything from a Linux server to OSX to Windows 10 to Android and iOS mobile devices sharing the same Dropbox account).

stormbeta• 10 years ago

Not really. I stay with Dropbox because, as others have said, it just works, and it does so across pretty much every major platform, both desktop and mobile. Cloud storage is their core product, and it shows. And the pricing really isn't that different from other similar solutions from what I've seen.

The few times I tried to use Drive, it was considerably more hassle to work with (and slow), iCloud was right out because it's Apple-platforms only, and my experiences with OneNote's sync issues makes me wary of trying OneDrive. Haven't looked at Box since I was under the impression it was aimed at businesses/enterprise more than individuals.

Afforess• 10 years ago

Dropbox works.

Put aside all the concerns over War Crimes or Spying, or Security, Dropbox simply works. Every mobile platform is supported. Every desktop platform is supported. Sharing, Teams, direct links, all the core features are there. Anyone can safely recommend and share Dropbox files with their Grandma (with a PC still running XP), or their Mac loving parents, or their weird hipster friend running Gentoo GNU/Linux, and Dropbox will still work.

A lot of HN prioritizes things like data security or political signaling over frictionless implementations. Sure you can get secure file synchronization with rsync and ssh keys, but the average consumer has never even seen a terminal. I'm sure security and politics are important when selling to other tech users, but Dropbox is general consumer facing, and they have succeeded at their task, making flash drives obsolete.

jasonsync3• 10 years ago

Agreed, it's just got to work.

We're working on an alternative: https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/

e12e• 10 years ago

Do you find Dropbox to work any better than Google drive? If so how/when/where?

I'm pretty firmly in the if-can't-self-host-i-don't-care camp (which rules out Dropbox and drive alike) - but I've recently had reason to share documents at work, without any in-house infrastructure. And the combination of "good enough" Google docs and sheets along with easy to use drive on laptop/desktop/mobile is hard to beat - especially with a pretty easy learning curve.

I only whish drive had the ability to mark a "folder" as available offline, as the fiction of 4g everywhere gets a bit tiresome when you find yourself on a mountain and need to pull up your list of students to make sure you haven't left someone to bleed out on the way up (ok, for that you practice the buddy system and have a paper backup. But it's still nice to work on notes offline wherever you are and have them sync, without offline-first being something special).

citrin_ru• 10 years ago

Every desktop platform is supported.

Not every. Dropbox doesn't work on FreeBSD. But mobile client probably the best.

Cyph0n2• 10 years ago

The key issue for me is that I don't currently need 1 TB, which is why I use Google Drive's 100 GB option. If Dropbox added a 250 GB option or something, I'd switch immediately.

Dylan16807• 10 years ago

rsync isn't enough. Bidirectional sync with nodes that can drop offline is a pain to handle.

agjacobson3• 10 years ago

You're right. It's been years since I carried around a flash drive, only to lose it, or not know which flash drive has...

ladzoppelin• 10 years ago

Yea, I agree. We were just saved by their unlimited versioning and now I only recommend Dropbox. If your business account files ever become encrypted make sure you call support immediately.

niftich3• 10 years ago

A combination of name recognition, customer satisfaction or customer inertia, a decent product, and data compartmentalization.

For example, it irks me that Google Drive is a catch-all storage space for Google products; sometimes all you want is a dumb folder that just syncs up and down whatever you put into it and Dropbox (and Box) give that to you without any mandatory integrations that benefit the companies that bankroll the storage (Google Drive, OneDrive), but not necessarily you.

It's also nice that Dropbox treats every platform as a first-class citizen. It's pretty obvious that some storage products are a just pieces of a larger puzzle that you happen to be able to use as a cloud drive, while some other companies make it clear that offering a cloud drive is their primary business.

rootusrootus2• 10 years ago

I don't understand your comparison. iCloud is only $0.99 for the 50GB option. I have over 300GB (and growing) worth of pictures and videos that I've been collecting since my first kid was born 6 years ago. It would be $9.99 on iCloud just as it is on Dropbox. Even cheaper on Dropbox, actually, because I buy by the year (and full disclosure, I get 2TB for the price of 1TB because I'm a long term customer, but I only use about half a TB overall so it's no difference to me).

Aside from the price, Dropbox just works. Android, iPhone, my Macbook Pros, my wife's Windows 10 laptop -- no problems, it just does what we expect it to.

I've looked at other solutions, even signed up for the trial of OneDrive (got burned on their filename length limit, oddly enough), and decided Dropbox works well enough to keep. I reevaluate every year and I'm perfectly willing to move when someone comes along that is conclusively better. They all match each other pretty quickly on pricing, so it's reliability (first) and features (second) that get my wallet to open.

basch• 10 years ago

if you dont care about the best usability, and you dont collaborate, Amazon Cloud Drive is 60/year for unlimited storage. not that youll hit 2tb soon, but for someone looking for cheap and easy cloud storage, dropbox is kind of expensive. you pay for the featureset not the storage size.

wsc981• 10 years ago

Storing those photos and videos on Google Photos [0] would be free though. Just last week I migrated my photos away from iCloud and to Google Photos, since I don't really want to spend money for storage. And I got sick of the notification in Mac OS X to upgrade my iCloud storage.

For people who value privacy a lot, maybe Google Photos might not be a nice option. I should note that one can choose whether to share photos with other people or not on Google Photos.

---

[0] https://photos.google.com

jdlyga• 10 years ago

I've lost files on iCloud. It's also harder to use.

thirdsun• 10 years ago

iCloud is close to useless if you need platform-agnostic storage. I only use it for iOS backups and of course the apps that sync their data via iCloud. Does the service even offer a file browser?

Whenever I deal with data I want to access on a file level and not through apps, like documents, photos, etc. I use Dropbox. And since I have to backup my music library (500 GB) somewhere anyway, I'll gladly use Dropbox Pro tier. Yes, I could save 3 bucks by using Amazon Cloud Drive or other services, but Dropbox' user experience and thoughtful design is second to none.

gautamdivgi• 10 years ago

Will echo what others said. Dropbox works - and it works cross-platform. I have linux, mac & windows desktops/laptops and iphones/ipads... dropbox has a complete cross-platform solution which integrates well with the native file browsing mechanism. I won't even consider icloud.

My use of dropbox has grown - but I primarily used it to store and retrieve a lot of data that I was analyzing when did my PhD. The data were several 100 GB in size. The 1 TB solution came quite handy. I also moved between my mac & linux during that time. I just had my files when I needed them.

bad_user• 10 years ago

Even though I have 3 Apple devices, I cannot use iCloud because I also use non-Apple devices, like Linux, Windows and Android. Yes, all of them. Dropbox has support for all, including Linux, which is a big deal.

Dropbox also does file versioning. You get an addon and it does versioning for a year. You cannot speak of having backups without this feature and iCloud doesn't. Get a ransomeware on your computer and you'll see what I'm talking about ;-)

And also, once you get in the habit of saving stuff, 1 TB is really not that much. My personal photo/video archive is 90 GB. I have another 20 GB of online presentations I gave to colleagues, archived just in case, about 10 GB of music, 30 GB of movies (mostly for my son, as he'd be really upset without his favorites), recovery stuff, project backups, all in all I exceed 200 GB. Actually at the rate I'm growing, 1 TB might soon be insufficient.

I also understand the reluctance to pay for stuff, but personally I think my data deserves the price of 2-3 coffees per month. My personal email deserves another coffee or two.

Spooky23• 10 years ago

It depends on what you're doing. If you're in the Apple ecosystem with a Mac and iPhone/iPad, the iCloud photo storage is really awesome. For us, it took away the hassle of managing iOS storage.

But... the iCloud Drive function is immature and unreliable.

Right now, I subscribe to Dropbox Pro and iCloud. I'll probably drop Dropbox as their photo story sucks, and they don't make key features available to "Pro" users like full text search.

agjacobson3• 10 years ago

Dropbox just works. Go on vacation, my itinerary, all my travel docs, critical material, it's in Dropbox, and often available offline, since wifi can be spotty. Now its in my phone and my Ipad as well. It just works. And if you're cheap like me, you manage Dropbox, not waste it.

But iCloud is the sleeper. In particular, Notes seems to be open on my desktop and all my devices. A terrific application.

azinman2• 10 years ago

Nothing can be concluded from this data as is. It's by usage on their platform.

A totally different way to read this would be Dropbox needs the most help from 3rd parties. Another would be that Dropbox is the platform that people build for the most.

danatkinson3• 10 years ago

I'm struggling to understand why. It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.

ing33k• 10 years ago

How is a poor business model related to market share ?

danatkinson3• 10 years ago

That's a good question/point and suggests a lack of education of its users of alternatives which are cheaper/better/more reliable.

chickenbane• 10 years ago

Dropbox is currently indispensable for iOS users. Most iOS people I know use Dropbox as the clunky-but-works app-to-app sharing mechanism. Dropbox is not as popular on Android because apps can integrate more naturally.

iCloud may be easier and is the probable successor, but Apple has only recently gotten its cloud game together and its free option is only 5GB.

Eventually the platforms are going to make using a third party obsolete (arguably already so on Android) so I predict we're at peak Dropbox usage. Especially considering Google's new Pixel phones will store all photos at full resolution for free, I'm sure Apple will at least have to increase their free storage tier.

0xffff2• 10 years ago

I'm confused by your comment... I'm a recent convert to iOS from Windows Phone, and I've just kept on using OneDrive for my documents. I'm not even sure what "app-to-app sharing" means. Dropbox definitely isn't indispensable to me.

rogerbinns• 10 years ago

Dropbox tends to sync more reliably than other services. This isn't something that affects every user. But a sync solution that doesn't work well enough for you despite being cheaper, easier to setup, space etc, isn't that useful.

Dropbox is the only service (I know of) that supports Linux. While it may not affect you directly, it does affect who you can interoperate with. For example in a startup with developers using Linux, you'll need something that works for them too.

acdha2• 10 years ago

It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.

That's three major questions begged in a single sentence, followed by 3 more in the next. Perhaps if you tried to back up each of those claims, you'd have an easier time understanding.

“Poor business model” would be the first place to start since Dropbox has ton of users and they tend to be loyal: learning why would tell you whether you're making the right comparisons.

“Security” is a judgement call but it's certainly not true that this is accepted conventional wisdom. Sure, there's the occasional hyperbolic blog post which makes the rounds before someone looks into the details and debunks the conspiracy theories but Apple and Google certainly get those, too.

Continuing the trend, the pricing also does not support your claims:

Google:

1TB = $9.99/mo (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en)

Dropbox:

1TB = $9.99/mo (https://www.dropbox.com/plans)

Apple:

1TB = $9.99/mo (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238)

Even if the pricing wasn't the same for all three services, that's a relatively small amount of money to pay for a service which many people rely on heavily and you couldn't say anything meaningful about pricing without talking about the different features. If you valued a particular feature or related service (e.g. Google Photos, Dropbox's cross-platform support & integration with a wide range of mobile apps, etc.) many people will consider it worth paying a small amount more per month to get their favorite choice – we're talking numbers well under what many people spend at Starbucks in the same time-period, after all.

One point in particular you should think about is the reason why I've heard so many non-IT people favor Dropbox: it's easy to setup, syncs reliably (as opposed to iCloud's same-week synchronization), and they always have a full copy of their data on every computer. It's really easy to forget how much people value the idea that they will never be in the case where a network error or billing screwup prevents them from accessing their files. That doesn't have to be a common event for people to want to avoid it.

danatkinson3• 10 years ago

Poor business model: I refer to their freemium offering which is poor compared to competitors.

Security: If you think that's a judgement call, fine, if you think that the dropbox hack is a judgment issue.

Pricing: For Joe Bloggs, 100GB is generally enough. Google handily offers that for $2. With Dropbox, there's a cliff - a few gig for free or a terabyte for $10/m. Why no middle ground? Both Apple and Google offer scaled plans, why doesn't Dropbox?

KayL• 10 years ago

dropbox has a better desktop client to share stuff. It makes the difference to end users. But it's slow sync outside US.

joeblau• 10 years ago

The way I hear Aaron Levie speak, I would have thought Box had more market share.

jseaidou• 10 years ago

Box is more enterprise/business focused.

discodave2• 10 years ago

Given that Apple was spending in the order of $1 billion to store iCloud data in AWS I don't think this claim is exactly credible.

Dropbox reportedly had to move 500PB of data off of AWS which at a very naive $0.03 per GB per month would only be around $180MM per year. $0.03 is probably higher than the rate dropbox pays per GB but I'm ignoring network ingress/egress costs.

From those back of the envelope calculations I think it's safe to say that iCloud is very likely larger, or at least a similar size to Dropbox.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastr...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3045436/data-center-cloud/app...

droidz5• 10 years ago

Maybe. This report seems to just take Dropbox Google Microsoft and Box into account. But is iCloud really that big when you talk about usage? They store tons of data but most of it might be just iOS backups which are activated by default for every user. Consider that usage or not.

s3r3nity• 10 years ago

I think so - and the fact that it's so in the background speaks to how well the user experience is designed for iCloud. Apple pretty much surreptitiously hides the backup of contacts, photos, calendars, email (yes - a lot of people use iCloud mail), and lastly documents. The fact that Apple was so late to the game on iCloud Drive was that a lot of the shit that the average person doesn't want to manually back-up and monitor are handled in the background by Apple ("magically" to use their term.) I personally love Dropbox, but I would find it a nuisance to manage my contacts, or anything else beyond my documents and occasional photos backup.

Therefore, regardless of manual input necessary, it should still count as usage. I imagine a lot of people store backups on Dropbox, and that looks like it's counted in the article.

Yet, I am kind of surprised that the prevalence of Android software doesn't correlate to Google Drive market share.

Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile

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