TechCrunch: Recently Dropbox was in the news for revealing they’d hit 175 million users, and daring to say they could replace the hard drive. Big words. But what’s the engineering back-story of how they got there? How do successful startups scale, in technical terms, to hundreds of millions of users? It turns it one of the ways it became successful was by creating a very simple and flexible platform early on.
For months, Dropbox users were waiting, and finally, they can download a beta of the desktop app that operates natively on Apple’s Arm-based processors. Users
However, there's a catch: the app is invite-only for now. While the general public can download and install it onto their devices, no one can use it without being granted access (presumably a beta key of some kind).
The good news is that folks who had more than three devices attached to their account before March 2019 will be spared from the three-device limit.
$257M of funding for 175M users... I use Dropbox and didn't know I'm that expensive... Do they make a profit?