Dropbox Seemingly Has No Plans to Natively Support Apple Silicon Macs [Updated]

Dropbox seems to not have any plans to natively support Apple silicon Macs almost one year after the first Macs equipped with the M1 chip were made available.


Mitchell Hashimoto shared a Dropbox support thread on Twitter that revealed a saga about native support for Apple silicon Macs. Dropbox seems to insist that native Apple silicon support will only be implemented if a large number of community members vote for it. Multiple requests are being made with different words, fragmenting the votes of users for support.

Dropbox does not support Apple Silicon natively and there are no plans for it. These official replies are quite embarrassing. I honestly didn't expect this to be the reason to change after 12 years of subs, but it might be. https://t.co/OjthQ32phV Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh) October 27, 2021

The thread received responses from Dropbox staff in July explaining that "this idea will need a bit of support before we share it with our team." They also flagged Apple silicon support for more votes. Dropbox staff replied to the thread again requesting native Apple silicon support. They stated that Dropbox would continue to work with all devices running supported macOS versions using Apple's Rosetta translator layer.

Other complaints include that Dropbox with Rosetta reduces MacBook battery life and consumes a large amount of memory.

Although Apple silicon Macs could be natively supported by Dropbox in the future (although that is possible), the manner in which the issue was delegated to two standoffish replies on a support forum appears to have caused outrage. The thread was brimming over with angry replies and claims from users who are considering moving to other services.

Google Drive has been updated to support native Apple silicon support. Other services like Microsoft OneDrive, Box and Microsoft OneDrive are also testing native Apple silicon support.

Update 9:45 AM: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and founder of Dropbox apologized for the confusion caused by "not optimal" support responses. He said that Dropbox was "certainly supporting Apple Silicon" and that a native Apple silicon build is planned to be released in the first half next year.