Dropbox kicked off its first ever developer conference today. The company took the opportunity to reveal that it now has 175 million users, and over a billion files synced every day.
According to TechCrunch, Dropbox only had 100 million users just this past November, so the growth thing is going pretty well. And today’s news should help
At the conference, Dropbox announced a new suite of tools for developers.
“It’s a challenge for developers to provide an amazing user experience across many different platforms and devices,” the company says. “Our Sync and Core APIs already take care of syncing files and folders, but as people use mobile apps more and more, a lot of their stuff doesn’t really look like a file at all. It could be anything — settings, contacts, to-do list items, or the latest doodle you drew.”
Now there’s a new Datastore API, which the company says it’s using to “move beyond files” and provide a new way to store and sync 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,” says DropBox. “Imagine a task-tracking app that works on both your iPhone and the web. If it’s built with the Datastore API, you can check off items from your phone during a cross-country flight and add new tasks from your computer and Dropbox will make sure the changes don’t clobber each other.”
The company also announced the new Chooser and Saver drop-ins. The former lets people access files in their Dropbox from the web and mobile apps, and the latter lets users save files to Dropbox in one click. These are already being taken advantage of by Yahoo Mail, Shutterstock and Mailbox.
Yahoo announced Dropbox integration for Yahoo Mail (whose redesign is currently getting torn apart by users) back in April.
Today, at Dropbox’s conference, Yahoo announced new Dropbox integration for Yahoo Mail on Android in an effort to make it easier for users to send files while on the go.
“In the app, start a new email, tap the attachment icon and choose ‘Share from Dropbox,'” explains Yahoo in a blog post. “If you’ve already linked your Dropbox account, then you can start choosing files to share right away. If you don’t have an account, just sign up from within the app.”
For more from the conference and about the company’s plans check this pair of in-depth pieces from Wired.
