Dropbox will shut down its Mailbox e-mail app next year, two years after it arrived in the iOS App Store atop a mountain of hype. The company is also shutting down Carousel, an app for syncing and sharing photos.
Explaining the decision, Dropbox said it is trying to increase its focus on collaboration. The Mailbox team alluded to this in its own announcement, saying that “we realised there’s only so much an e-mail app can do to fundamentally fix e-mail.” The team will now focus on streamlining “the workflows that generate so much e-mail in the first place”.
As for Carousel, the team’s goodbye letter hinted that the app just wasn’t very popular. “[O]ver the past year and a half, we’ve learned the vast majority of our users prefer the convenience and simplicity of interacting with their photos directly inside of Dropbox,” the team wrote.
Mailbox was once a shining example of what mobile e-mail should be, with an interface focused on swiping, and helpful features like a snooze button for responding to important e-mails. At its launch in February 2013, Mailbox required joining a waitlist just to use it, and Dropbox acquired the app a month later. Mailbox has since expanded to other platforms such as Android and Mac, but similar features have also come to other clients, including CloudMagic, Google Inbox, and Microsoft Outlook.
Carousel wasn’t quite as unique among photo apps, though alongside Mailbox it pushed the idea that killer apps could lead to greater use of paid cloud storage. Again, it’s a strategy that larger rivals Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all espoused, with deep cloud storage hooks built into their respective products. It seems Dropbox is now abandoning that path, and focusing on collaboration instead.
For Mailbox, the service will shut down on 26 February 2016, and all data will be deleted within 30 days. Users won’t lose any actual e-mails – those are still stored with Gmail or iCloud – and all lists will remain as labels in Gmail or folders in iCloud under the [Mailbox] header. However, any drafts written in Mailbox will be deleted, so users will need to save those manually before the cut-off date. Users will retain the 1Gb of Dropbox bonus space they received for linking their accounts to Mailbox.
Dropbox says it considered open-sourcing Mailbox, but ultimately decided against it. The full FAQ for Mailbox users is here.
Carousel, meanwhile, has a shutdown date of March 31, 2016. From then on, users can view and back up their photos through the Dropbox app, though the iOS app doesn’t support album view currently. Flashbacks will no longer be available after the cutoff date, nor will shared albums, though Dropbox will release an export tool for the latter. Users will retain any bonus space they earned by installing the app. More details are available on the Carousel FAQ.
IDG News Service
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