Dropbox announced a new Sync API today as part of its new Dropbox Platform, the first in a series of ventures that means to provide ubiquitous access to your files from wherever you are. One major tenet of the product is the easy integration of the service into third-party apps, allowing developers who until now have been hacking Dropbox integration to use its syncing abilities for pervasive app data.
While this is certainly similar to efforts made by Apple, Google, Microsoft and others, Dropbox has the benefit of being considered more reliable, more functional and overall more versatile than any built-in pervasive file sync platform to date.
As Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said during his keynote address at the company’s first annual developer conference, “Sync is the new save.” Dropbox already allows users to save files in a pervasive and constantly-updating folder, which is then synchronized with the company’s servers and downloaded, when needed, to other computers, tablets and mobile devices.
The new suite of tools is mainly for developers, though users will start seeing the benefits in third-party apps as quickly as today, with the implementation of Dropbox file sharing in Yahoo’s Android mail client. Mailbox, the mail client the company purchased earlier this year, will also see some Dropbox-specific features in its next big update.
Dropbox also shared usage data today, claiming 175 million active users, up from 100 million just eight months ago.
Dropbox has clients for iOS, Android, Windows 8, Windows, OS X and Linux.
Source: Dropbox Blog
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