Dropbox made a host of app announcements designed to reflect its evolution from online storage and sharing to become what the company describes as “a home for life”.
Headlining the announcements was its new Carousel app, which joins the ranks of imaging-related titles available. The company said it “combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs-up new ones as you take them”.
Photos are grouped by event and, “unlike other mobile galleries”, the size of Carousel is not limited by the space on a device. It also features private conversations support, to share images with friends and family, and can combine photos shared with users’ own images.
According to TechCrunch, Carousel’s sharing tools can be used with any email address or phone number, whether the recipient has a Dropbox account or not.
The app is available on Android and iOS.
Carousel has not met with an overwhelmingly positive response, with many users noting that smartphones already feature image gallery apps, and that Dropbox back-up is already available. And the size of a user’s image store is limited by the size of their Dropbox account – whereas some alternatives such as Flickr and Picasa are more generous.
The company also said that the Mailbox app it acquired last year is available for Android.
This email management app has also been updated, to “learn from your swipes and snoozes to automate common actions”. The company said that the feature, Auto-swipe, is “something we wanted to release with the first version of Mailbox, but it’s only with recent improvements to our infrastructure that such a smart service has been possible”.
Mailbox now uses Dropbox to sync preferences and Auto-swipe patterns across email and devices, giving a seamless experience across devices and email accounts.
“This is part of an ongoing integration of Mailbox into the Dropbox family,” it noted.
According to TechCrunch, Dropbox also revealed it now has 275 million users, up from 200 million in November 2013.
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