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Comment by gustavomd | Hacker News Reader

Very well written and amazing job. I really trust Dropbox engineering teams. My only wish would be the return of the simple desktop app for those of us that just need ultra reliable synced folders (I use macOS). The app today is bloated and upon boot takes 600MB of RAM. Would you guys ever consider a streamlined version of the app for desktop?

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This is definitely something we're talking about. We're aware there are a set of users who want just sync and we're figuring out how to ship that while making our other features discoverable.

HN is a tough crowd to sell everyman software to. Compared to your moderately tech literate person off the street, many here fiercely stand their ground on the computing solutions that they choose. Maybe this is a consequence of knowing how the sausage is made.

I admire your goal to try to deliver value to both groups. I think this strategy is broadly underappreciated, and I expect it improves the product faster than focusing on either group exclusively.

Thanks so much. We love to share how we build things with the tech community and we know the tradeoffs when we post them.

We're just a bunch of people doing our best to do right by our users.

> This is definitely something we're talking about. We're aware there are a set of users who want just sync and we're figuring out how to ship that while making our other features discoverable.

Excellent. I would go a bit further. I not only just want sync, but I'm willing to (mostly) give up the hosted mirroring in order to get unlimited user friendly device-device file synchronization[0]. On top of that, there are plenty of scenarios (largely around collaboration and/or mobile) where I would like to selectively opt-in to cloud mirroring, for which I'd be quite happy to pay a modest amount.

So this folder of personal documents and ebooks[1] synced across these devices (potentially including another user's, if/when they are on the same local network) but no mirroring in the cloud, and that folder of photos synced only between my laptop and my phone, including cloud storage backup and mirroring ($).

[0] Yes, I'm aware that there are plenty of solutions, starting with rsync etc., that I could cobble together, but most of them aren't particularly user-friendly.

[1] BTW, have you thought of selling a Dropbox-centric e-reader?

Regarding [0]: Are you aware of Syncthing? It's p2p, allows you to select folders and exactly which devices they are shared with. I have personally had issues with it, but it seems like I'm the only one. The feature set seems to perfectly check out.

I was aware of Syncthing, but last I checked there were some caveats that made it unsuitable. Looking again now, it seems those have been largely addressed, although if I want a hosted mirror I'll still have to set one up myself, and it looks like each shared folder has to be set up and authenticated on each device (ie. there seems to be no notion of a "user" who chooses which of their devices have a copy).

I appreciate the nudge to look at it again, and at the very least this will stop me from having to pay attention to Dropbox's enforced case-insensitivity.

Please add my voice to that. I just want sync. Not a fat client constantly blaring about features for sharing and comments and teams, while not actually syncing my files thanks to "Smart Sync".

My current Dropbox subscription term ends in February. At that time I currently plan to leave Dropbox in favor of a service that just does sync and no other garbage.

> The app today is bloated and upon boot takes 600MB of RAM

Is that a joke or a bug?

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