Not knowing that Dropbox offered a password manager … I misinterpreted the headline to mean I could no longer log into my Dropbox account with a password anymore (and thought they were forcing passkeys).
alisonatwork · 1h ago
This recently happened to me on Booking.com and... I ended up not using Booking.com to book a hotel. So long, genius status, or whatever.
It absolutely drives me nuts that the western world is moving to "as seen in China" login-via-callback flow. Aside from the privacy issue of forcing people to attach an email or phone number or third-party auth provider to their every account, it's just a waste of time and energy to delete our passwords and force us through this weird multi-app flow just to log in to a service we spent years logging into without ever getting hacked. Imagine if every time you wanted to get into your house you had to press the doorbell and then wait for someone to call you back to decide whether you should be allowed in. It's absurd.
bapak · 2m ago
All bets are on Passkeys, but I'm sure a lot of people can't deal with them due to lack of sync across devices.
Passkeys are a great Trojan horse for password managers vs oauth, magic links, "password123" strings
ijustlovemath · 1h ago
This is especially true if you simply increase the minimum password length to a certain amount. The major browsers include password managers for specifically this purpose which can generate passwords; why don't we move towards educating users how to use these tools instead of centralizing all the failure points of the web?
And yes, I understand the major conflict of interest in saving important passwords to Google, which I personally don't do and wouldn't recommend, but I think if they're interested in staying out of the Googleverse, we can also tell people about the good paid alternatives out there.
somenameforme · 41m ago
Paid vs Google seems a bit of a false dichotomy. Bitwarden and countless other such programs are completely free for normal usage. The freemium stuff comes in for business and uses far beyond just a password manager.
hug · 46m ago
> Imagine if every time you wanted to get into your house you had to press the doorbell and then wait for someone to call you back to decide whether you should be allowed in.
This is exactly what I do to visitors to my house.
windexh8er · 11m ago
I was wondering, genuinely: is Dropbox still something the masses use? I found the product to be subpar many years ago and stopped using it and only seemed to read about it continuing to degrade.
Hilarious that the bitrotted dropbox blogpost linked in the techcrunch article discussing this vulnerability (quoted as saying things like “this never should have happened”) instead redirects to some dropbox blog home page, with “What happens when AI joins your team?” prominently featured. Initially I thought their postmortem was blaming AI very openly 14 years ago :D
brundolf · 1h ago
Same
stmw · 4h ago
Strategically this doesn't make a lot of sense to me (password management is a natural adjacent product to their core offering), but I am sure they had lots of data that showed it wasn't succeeding. Having been involved in password managemetn before, what I have learned is that it is surprisingly difficult to continue to maintain as both browsers and websites change, the mobile situation is very difficult and it's just one of those software projects that seems simple.. but isn't. So if there is not a big attach rate, it makes sense for Dropbox to drop it.
treetalker · 5h ago
I kinda wish Dropbox would stick to dropboxing.
Always with the product-line creep. No doubt the next offerings will be Dropbox Email and "Dropbox the LLM" (better than Spaceballs the Flamethrower, I suppose).
rjh29 · 4h ago
I agree but what are they supposed to do? Cloud sharing is commoditized now and it's easy to move providers. Their only choice was to try to move up the stack, but there is no clear direction. It's video editing, e-signatures/encryption, passwords, AI, document editing... so far I haven't found any of those offerings useful. Their Linux support is however much appreciated.
Groxx · 2h ago
Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.
Like. Build a decent product. The lack of any major competition doesn't mean they should stop improving and branch out into costly absurdity, at least try to keep up with Maestral with 100x the headcount.
kelvinjps10 · 31m ago
Anyone knows about a good Dropbox alternative? That supports Linux
jsk2600 · 2m ago
Google Drive with Insync client (paid), I’m using it with no issues for years on Linux.
Hamuko · 9m ago
I doubt that Dropbox is able to compete on price against companies like Google, who can bundle all of their Google services in the same package as Google Drive while being able to reduce hosting costs through sheer scale.
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
> Like. Build a decent product.
Man, wouldn’t it be so cool if tech companies actually were competitive instead of trying to establish parasitic marketshare or dying with no in-between?
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
Well... they could have not enabled a "share your data with us" checkbox without ever asking the user. I have no idea how many customers they lost by playing fast and loose with privacy (I, at least, was one), but it doesn't seem like it could've been worth it.
emeril · 2h ago
I suppose though to be honest, it seems they are still the best for cloud sharing I think?
There are 5 steps for every one 1 there once was for any given operation on the platform. The next offering will be 6 steps.
rjh29 · 4h ago
Google are known for cancelling products but you can at least be sure your files, passwords, bookmarks, map pins, and e-mails aren't going away. They have a core set of apps they've maintained for over two decades without pulling the rug out from under them.
mantra2 · 54m ago
I always figure with Google as long as the products are part of the core Apps/G-Suite/Workspace offering they’re fairly safe to use and anything else is a coin flip.
relyks · 52m ago
This stinks. I use this as my main password manager :(
It absolutely drives me nuts that the western world is moving to "as seen in China" login-via-callback flow. Aside from the privacy issue of forcing people to attach an email or phone number or third-party auth provider to their every account, it's just a waste of time and energy to delete our passwords and force us through this weird multi-app flow just to log in to a service we spent years logging into without ever getting hacked. Imagine if every time you wanted to get into your house you had to press the doorbell and then wait for someone to call you back to decide whether you should be allowed in. It's absurd.
Passkeys are a great Trojan horse for password managers vs oauth, magic links, "password123" strings
And yes, I understand the major conflict of interest in saving important passwords to Google, which I personally don't do and wouldn't recommend, but I think if they're interested in staying out of the Googleverse, we can also tell people about the good paid alternatives out there.
This is exactly what I do to visitors to my house.
Always with the product-line creep. No doubt the next offerings will be Dropbox Email and "Dropbox the LLM" (better than Spaceballs the Flamethrower, I suppose).
Like. Build a decent product. The lack of any major competition doesn't mean they should stop improving and branch out into costly absurdity, at least try to keep up with Maestral with 100x the headcount.
Man, wouldn’t it be so cool if tech companies actually were competitive instead of trying to establish parasitic marketshare or dying with no in-between?
Been there, done that: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...