Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

The way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch.

Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago!

Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the potential. I think it's because the Dropbox founders were so consumer-focused that they couldn't envision how huge Paper could be in the productivity tools space. They kept framing it as an Evernote competitor, instead of seeing it turning into something like Notion.

Even when they finally seemed to understand that Dropbox was never going to be a B2C sensation, they kept acquiring "side product" businesses instead of ones that built on Dropbox's existing value. (To their credit, this was the zeitgeist back when they started — B2B was not cool at all, and the sort of B2C/B hybrid that exists now wasn't a thing.)

Meanwhile startups like Notion actually saw the opportunity and blossomed. And nowadays, even super-slow Google is releasing features like pageless mode, markdown support, etc. Such that Paper is almost irrelevant at this point, despite having had such a massive head start.

It's sad because I can easily imagine an alternate future where Dropbox understood what Paper could be, and invested in it alongside things like an Airtable competitor, to create a truly viable, and forward-looking alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Drive, without all the baggage of being a Microsoft Office clone.

So far this year they've discontinued Paper (app), Passwords, Send and Track, Vault and Capture. Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones!

Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.

I am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used.

I would love for them to implement:

- The ability to exclude folders from syncing - useful for .venv etc

- The ability to sync folders outside of the dropbox folder

- Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html

Good. That app was horrible. I'd get a notification of a comment and 90% of the time it wouldn't load the comment, so I'd have to scroll to the bottom where the comments were and I couldn't tell what the comment related to so I'd reload the link and hope for the it to properly highlight the text and show the comment and that would work maybe 40% of the time. Editing text was frustrating as well.

If they provide a better web experience I'm all for this.

What Dropbox has been doing to Paper has been so sad to me. I've been a daily user for almost a decade (and Hackpad before that), and their recent move into combining it into Dropbox itself has caused me to almost completely stop.

I get what they're doing... unifying everything into one system. I get it. But I can't find any of my docs anymore. When I go to paper.dropbox.com, where there use to be thousands of docs, there's now nothing.

The app wasn't great, but it was better than nothing.

I'm continually impressed that Dropbox continues to exist, so long after their primary product offering was so thoroughly sherlocked by the big two B2C companies (Google and Apple) and the big two B2B companies (MS and Google). Especially because I've never worked anywhere that used Dropbox, so they don't have the long-tail life support legacy B2B money keeping them afloat like say, Lotus Notes did.

B2C was lost to them the minute Google Drive and iCloud Drive both got decent enough. Clearly with all their random acquisitions and stuff they were trying to become a #3 to MS and Google for corporate, but it's such a moat to penetrate, since they'd have to become at least a little better than at least one of them at most of the big productivity things (email, calendar, documents & drive, chat, meetings), or be a lot better at one specific thing, enough that businesses will have an appetite to keep paying for GOOG/MS's bundles and add-on additional cost to pay for Dropbox too. If I had to vote for a company least likely to succeed I'd pick Dropbox, and that's without any shade to the people running it. They're just in a terrible market position.

Dropbox is example of a bad company.

Why Dropbox doesn’t offer features adjacent to sync, like: end to end encryption for consumers, backup solutions like backblaze, S3-like buckets, controls like with S3 (like those related to IAM), tools to monitor folders and see analytics, flexible storage plans, equivalent of the Firefox/Bitwarden send, equivalent of services like ProtonDrive, and stop locking down ordinary features behind additional payment wall (even in paid plans, like using your available storage with more than one user for security and for defining scope for each device). My Dropbox Plus $120/year offers a fraction of what my managed nextcloud provides.

If you pay Dropbox 10$/month, you can’t set a damn password or expiry date to the file that you share. You have to pay even more for this simple feature.

Their password manager is limited to 50 passwords in their free plan. What these people are thinking?

I always liked the file syncing part of Dropbox, and was considering their Family plan a few years back, until they increased the prices. If I remember correctly, their reasoning included all the additional features like Paper which you would get but that I never needed. It's currently at 203 EUR/year here - pretty steep if you only care about the core usecase of syncing files.

Man, I really wish they would focus on their primary storage offering. I _love_ Dropbox and have introduced many many friends and family to it.

That is testament how good and easy their storage offering is to use. This is where I've previously failed to convince the same group of people to use Google Drive / OneDrive.

Well, saw that coming and too bad because for a moment and before notion took off, it had a chance. I gave up using it when critical notes I wrote in offline mode in the subway did not sync as I was lead to believe. Never touched it again.

They have a super fast and slick file storage app. Some of the features that are natural additions to that feature set work quite well, like document scanning. But so much of what Dropbox does seems like they can't stay put and be happy with their core offering. Of course, they have to do this to increase revenue, for fear of becoming a mere commodity. It's tough.

Dropbox Paper was the best Notepad-like app in the market, only to Dropbox to completely stop developing it almost immediately and then eventually making it worse by making it Dropbox-backed and now killing the app. It's a shame really.