Dropbox proud to be Mac, looking forward to iOS 4

Dropbox won our award for Most Innovative Mac OS X App, but it's really the …

Jacqui Cheng – Jun 10, 2010 9:51 pm | 43

Dropbox's Adam Gross

Dropbox was the major cross-platform app among our 2010 Ars Design Awards. The application/service won our category for Most Innovative Mac OS X App, and despite Dropbox’s foray into the worlds of Windows, Linux, Android, Windows Mobile, and Palm Pre, it remains one of the most useful services for Mac users today. (Read our five suggested uses for Dropbox on the Mac for more details about the service.)

One of Dropbox’s most recent announcements is its new API. Dropbox Senior VP of Marketing and Sales Adam Gross told Ars that the reason it took this long to introduce was because, unlike even a few years ago, there are now two different problems to address: a mobile API and a desktop API. “Doing a Web API requires much more intricate set of semantics for indicating the state of the desktop in relation to the service,” Gross told Ars.

“Say I want to have a simple photo uploading service: file into a folder and have those files automatically processed by you guys to post to Ars,” said Gross. “There are weird states: if there’s some kind of processing state, how do I know that’s completed? How do we create the appropriate set of APIs without making it too onerous on the user experience?”

Despite some of these considerations, the company is very proud of what it has to offer and credits much of its success to its thriving user community. Dropbox doesn’t spend much on advertising, instead focusing its resources on offering users more free space for referrals which, in turn, bring more useful brains into the Dropbox forums. “If we can find a way to make the community more successful and they make us successful, then I’d rather spend my money on that than AdWords, for example,” Gross told us.

Much of this community is made up of Mac users, of course. “If we were PC-only, that would have been the wrong thing for the community,” Gross said. “We focused on the tech community to start with, like the Ars community and the Digg community, and those communities tend to lend themselves to Mac-ish-ness. It’s not even a special consideration: how could we not be on the Mac?”

It turns out the company’s openness to iProduct users has actually helped it grow quite a bit as well, as Gross said that there are a substantial number of new users who discover the service through the App Store on the iPhone or iPad. iPad users tend to use the service a little bit differently than other mobile users, too—Gross said users on the iPhone primarily read content from their Dropboxes, while iPad users are more prone to using the service for content creation.

Gross expressed enthusiasm for what users can do with Dropbox on a new iOS and iPhone 4. Among other things, they will be able to take photos, and possibly even video, directly into their Dropboxes. This would negate the need for tons of storage space on the device itself, and it’s similar to what some Android users can already do. All we have to say is that we can’t wait to see what Dropbox does with iOS 4, and the team is very deserving of our award.