Comment by newhouseb
10 years ago
> @newhouseb, I don't have Office, so I've turned off the badge. Is Dropbox now going to leave my accessibility permissions the way I set them? Or is it going to reactivate a permission behind my back that it no longer even needs?
Yep, we’re going to fix this so that if you uncheck it, we leave it unchecked.
> This fiasco has probably made it more likely that Apple will further lock down the accessibility APIs, possibly even making them unavailable without an Apple-issued, potentially App Store-only entitlement.
As alluded to elsewhere in this thread, this is already happening in macOS 10.12. We’ll be switching to the same approach that Steam (among others) do to request accessibility.
Honestly, after the last year and a half, anything that wants root access, that is not open source, is out. Now, being open source does not make that automatically safe but it is a step in the right direction. Dropbox, MS Office, etc, are closed source tools that puts too much at stake.
Granted my team is small, but we just uninstalled dropbox today. Going to use the web interface and look for another solution in the meantime.
I'd love to hear what you find. My research has shown that Dropbox is mostly the only sync service supported in mobile apps. iCloud is next. After that it's very rare to see any other integration.
I'd love to see Box or someone else encourage popular apps to support their sync platforms, but I doubt it will happen. I blame Apple for not supporting easy 3rd party integrations.
I have no idea what Dropbox actually is or does (I'm FOSS-only, at home and at work), I've only heard of it, so I may be way off the mark.
With that said, on the assumption that it is a way to exchange files between computers and/or share with other users, it would seem to be the case that ownCloud (nextCloud) fits the bill. You can host it yourself (as I do) or use a third party to host it for you. I have been using it for a number of years and I'm entirely happy with it.
Also, depending on your use scenario, another possible option may be https://www.stackfield.com/ a German end-to-end encrypted storage company. I believe there are others offering similar services.
Seafile (https://www.seafile.com) and ownCloud (https://owncloud.org) both are open source and have mobile apps. Worth checking!
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I switched from Dropbox to Mega a few years ago and they now have mobile apps, sync clients for multiple operating systems and decent browser extensions in addition to a more generous storage allowance. There is also the added benefit of encryption. So far I remain impressed with their service.
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Mac OS X is a mostly closed source operating system so I don't understand why you are drawing the line with third parties.
Apple has shown itself to be trustworthy.
Dropbox has done the opposite.
I suspect many would like to run something more open than OS X/macOS, but because of the alternatives, it's just not viable for business purposes not to, according to what their needs are. I know that is the situation for me.
Try SyncThing. It's cross-platform (written in Go), fast and secure (BitTorrent Sync style, but open-source).
I use it, but there's no iOS solution so I can't use it for a number of things.
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I should say, Ben, thank you for coming out in public and sharing your team's perspective. Your users are angry—and I think rightly so—but it does help that we are being told why it was done, that it was merely poor judgement rather than deliberate misbehavior, and that you are working to make the Dropbox client a more responsible citizen. Is it as good as not having done it in the first place? No. But it's much better than radio silence.