Integrating Dropbox Paper with Dropbox

Our company has been with Dropbox since the very early days, before they offered Business accounts. Our team shared at the time between personal accounts. We have finally made the decision to migrate from Dropbox to Google Drive. This issue was kind of the icing on the cake for us. 

I might be venting somewhat here, but in case someone from Dropbox reads this, maybe it will offer some insights. Dropbox has failed to innovate in my opinion and the core service is not much better than it was some years ago; in fact, some things have gotten worse. For example, the previews Dropbox displays are such low quality that I'm forced to download a file just to proof it. Previews weren't this low res in the past, and no, it has nothing to do with my internet connection. Previews are so low res that we literally send proofs to clients as attachments to avoid the back-and-forth, whether it's videos, PDFs or images. 

If anyone has a legacy account such as ours, you'll know how difficult it is to unshare certain folders or simply remove certain guests throughout your account. There's no bulk or recursive way to re-permission a parent folder and all folders within it. Sure, if you're starting with a fresh account, you'll likely use groups and have your sharing worked out, but with over a decade of sharing, contractors, and clients, you'll find it virtually impossible to truely understand the web of sharing within any given account or top-level folder.

Some other gripes I'll list so that this doesn't become too long of a post:

• Carousel – Our family used to love that app for viewing photos in DB. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot with the decision to discontinue this one. This left a huge opening for Google Photos. 

• Camer Upload – This feature on iPhone simply does not work unless you have the Dropbox app open. Another reason to move to Google Photos. 
• Paper – We love taking notes in Paper, but they get lost in the ether of the Paper app which essentially requires its own filing system separate from DB itself. This was the deciding factor for us as we were told integration would happen in 2020 between Paper and DB and nothing has changed. We made the decision to switch to Google Docs instead which perfectly integrates with Drive. 

• The DB Rebrand – I know it's not related to the product directly but the rebrand was a red-flag of sorts. It's terrible, the font is ugly, the colours are ugly and the implementation has been neither here nor there. I want a serious company with a practical interface for storing our company's files, not an eccentric rebrand. 

• The sequestering of new features to more expensive plans: Professional, Standard, Plus. 

I'm not sure what Dropbox is trying to be, but file syncing is not enough in 2021. With Drive, our plan is 20% cheaper, we know longer have to pay for Google Workplace additionally, each staff member gets 2TB instead of grouped 5TB account with DB. This 2TB counts towards our email too and as far as I can tell, our shared drives are limitless. Speaking of which, it is so much more intuitive to share multiple drives. Drive is faster, has better previews, more intuitive and robust sharing and integrates better with our daily apps. 

Ther are some things Dropbox does better, such as file history, seeing deleted files, the document scanner etc. It's a shame we're leaving but we feel like Dropbox is at a deadend.