End of support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5

Hi everyone,

We understand this is disruptive to some of our users and that's why we've announced this many months in advance. I’ve read all of your responses and wanted to provide some additional background on why we’re ending support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

Supporting these old versions of OS X would come at the expense of improvements for more recent versions of OS X. Allowing people to continue running what would become an old version of the desktop client is not an option because sometimes we must make non-backwards compatible changes to the way the client talks to the Dropbox servers.

Read on for more details…

Continuing to have our desktop client support 10.4 and 10.5 would come at the expense of improving the experience for more recent versions of OS X. The latest versions of several important components (3rd party software libraries) we rely upon no longer support 10.4 or 10.5. These updated versions have important improvements, bug fixes, and additional functionality. It would be a disservice to the vast majority of our Mac users running recent versions of OS X if we did not update to the latest versions of these components.

Several of you have suggested allowing people to continue using the current version of the desktop client (which in time would become an old version of the desktop client). This would not work because from time to time we must make non-backwards compatible changes to the way the desktop client communicates with our servers. For example in the coming months we will need to make a change to how we represent the underlying identifier we use for certain types of folders. This change is needed because Dropbox has become so much more popular than we initially imagined that we’ll need to switch from using a 32-bit identifier to a 64-bit identifier. This is just one example of a breaking change that periodically must be made.