Dropbox Sync API

This is awesome stuff. It really adds a lot of end-user benefits when your app is able to sync via Dropbox.<p>While the APIs are only for iOS and Android, on BlackBerry 10, it's technically baked into the OS. If the user has linked their device to Dropbox, the OS automatically syncs the filelist and presents it as a part of the filesystem. This means that the user can open, edit, and save files directly to their Dropbox, without having to worry about connectivity. This also means that every BlackBerry 10 app can access your Dropbox folder, for free.<p>Even still, I have a feeling the Sync API likely offers something more than what I've described, but I haven't had a chance to delve into it. But I'm glad to see Dropbox branching out like this.

I never understood this, the tutorial shows how to authenticate.<p>mDbxAcctMgr = DbxAccountManager.getInstance(getApplicationContext(), APP_KEY, APP_SECRET);<p>So anyone with some basic Android knowledge will be able to extract my applications key and secret?

If a user doesn't have an account (or hasn't linked their account yet) Dropbox should let developers store data in an anonymous account tied to that device until the uses does. I think developers would pay for that.

I kind of hope this ends up replacing iCloud in a lot of apps. iAwriter could really do with using Dropbox by default.

Great stuff. Now it just needs to find it's way into the KeePass apps.

Does this require that my apps users each have a dropbox account?

Android has had a Backup API for a <i>long</i> time: <a href="http://developer.android.com/training/cloudsync/backupapi.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.android.com/training/cloudsync/backupapi.ht...</a><p>It's one of the most useful, yet under-used feature of Android. It allows apps to save their settings for when users change devices. Sadly, it doesn't allow sync-ing.

I could use this for a Qt app. Why not a c or c++ api instead of IOs and android ?

I like the iOS API's simplicity. Also the ability to attach observers to file objects. Much easier to use than iCloud (IMHO) and cross platform are huge advantages for me personally.

Anybody know what API they're using under the hood for this? I have wanted to use the delta REST API (<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/api#delta" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/api#delta</a>) but since I can't limit it to the subdirs my app cares about, I get overwhelmed with a lot of noise and it generally ends up being more data than polling and walking the sub-tree each time.

It'd be nice to have the API also for platforms like Windows Phone/Windows 8 and a pure javascript implementation.<p>Still, this is quite good.

Wasn't this announced a month or so ago?

Is there anyway one can use it for a web app? I only see Android and iOS support.

For a just-released API/SDK, the documentation and tutorial on this is pretty nice.<p>Especially nice that for the Android SDK documentation, they didn't just publish javadoc-generated html files.

I'd like to see this baked into Mac/Win applications since I'm not using Dropbox but would still like to use sync capabilities without having to install the whole desktop client.

How did apps that used Dropbox handle it before this? Did they have to write a mechanism to sync data themselves?