Dropbox is having its first ever developer conference, DBX, and has announced an exciting new vision for the company. Dropbox introduced the new Dropbox Platform, which will go head to head with Apple’s iCloud syncing service. With Dropbox Platform, files and information can be synced seamless between different platforms.
The big advantage of the Dropbox Platform is platform agnosticism. Imagine yourself playing a game on your iPad and then wanting to play the same game on your Android phone later. Currently, there’s no way to sync your game’s save data between Android and iOS since iCloud only works between iOS, Mac, and PCs. The Dropbox Platform could theoretically allow for synced game saves, regardless of device and platform.
Google is slowly integrating a similar service into Android with its Google Play Game service, which will sync game data between devices but it has yet to appear on iOS. Cloud Save for Google Drive isn’t fully fleshed out yet and Dropbox has an opportunity to beat Google to the punch by creating a universal sync platform.
Developers can look forward to getting their hands on the new Sync API, which allows devs to implement file syncing with their apps to Dropbox. The company also announced the Datastore API, which handles files and info that the user doesn’t normally interact with like contact info. Datastore will act as the backbone for syncing things beyond files like application data.
There’s also options to create “choosers” and “savers” within Dropbox, which means applications that integrate the Dropbox Platform will allow users to open and send files from their Dropbox storage. Yahoo! Mail for iOS already supports this feature.
It’ll be interesting to see what types of apps integrate the new Dropbox Platform. It would be exciting to get cross-platform data sharing and it could potentially make switching devices painless. There’s a lot of potential for the Dropbox Platform if developers get behind it.
[Source: Dropbox Blog]
