Skip to content

Stupid bugs in mobile Dropbox

This short post contains some fuckups I found in mobile Dropbox. Both in Android app and in mobile website version of dropbox.com.

Two of them are just tiny and many users will probably ignore them. But third one is a big mother fucker, which in certain situations may lead you to data lost. All these were found in Dropbox for Android 2.1.8, running on Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.1.1.

The big sucker is about delayed file saves in Dropbox's internal text editor. It reports "File saved", before file is actually saved / uploaded to Dropbox!

When you hit Home Screen and immediately turn off your internet connection (because you think that file was saved), all your work is lost. When you go back to Dropbox, you see editor again, you where you left it and you're asked, if you want to discard changes or save the file?

You think, what the hell -- that filewas saved! So you click "Discard" and... all your work goes hell. A brilliant bug!

Second bug found in Dropbox app for Android causes that you can click on "Refresh" menu item sometimes even a dozen of times until you see that a file, you've just edited, has updated time info - i.e. "changed seconds ago", not a month ago, for example.

Or before you see new file, you've created, added to current folder. Refresh feature never worked for me from the first time. I always had to use it few times to see new files and updated time info. It only updates images quickly.

And third one gose for mobile version of dropbox.com and iPad Mini. Either iPad or Dropbox has some bug, which causes that Dropbox website opens in normal / desktop / non-mobile layout.

This happens only for Dropbox (other websites correctly detects iPad Mini as mobile device and presents mobile version of their websites) and only on iPad Mini (dropbox.com once opened on Android opens in mobile version). Additionally, if you're using Chrome (instead of Safari) on iPad Mini to browse dropbox.com, you won't be able to view or download your PDFs.

Leave a Reply