14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox has kicked off its first ever developer conference, DBX, with several announcements. The biggest one is also the biggest expansion move made by the company in years.
Dropbox wants to do more than just store your files, it wants to store your data; specifically, to become the backend storage for any type of app.
This way, you could use your Dropbox not just to store files and folders, but game saves, your personalized settings in an app, your draft documents, and so on.
"With the Datastore API, we’re moving beyond files and providing a new model for effortlessly storing and syncing app data. When you use an app built with datastores your data will be up-to-date across all devices whether you’re online or offline," Dropbox explained.
That sounds like an interesting addition to the Dropbox platform, but it hardly makes the service unique. There are many cloud platforms out there; Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, but also many other smaller players offer cloud storage options to developers.
What Dropbox brings to the table is simplicity and its years of experience dealing with syncing files from across devices. For example, if a user makes some changes in an app on the web and then others in the mobile version, while offline, the modifications may contradict each other.
Normally, the app developer would have to account for those issues; the storage cloud just handles the storage. With the Datastore API, Dropbox smartly merges the changes, like it has been doing with files for years.
There's another big advantage for developers. The storage is free, since all the data is kept by the users not by some centralized cloud paid by the app maker. That can also be a disadvantage, since developers don't get much control over the data without user approval.
However, in the days of companies and government agencies always wanting to gobble up more and more of your data, that's hardly a bad thing.