Image of Dropbox app on Android via Connor McKenna
For the first time in five years, the Dropbox Android app has gotten a major design overhaul to bring it up to speed, and based off its design changes looks like it wants to just be a part of the furniture.
Many of the changes that Dropbox has highlighted in its blog post appear to have brought it in line with the current Android Lollipop operating system, with an emphasis on more minimalism of buttons to click.
From the off, Dropbox and its head of design Alex Castellarnau has reduced the number of tabs needed to perform all the typical functions to four: files, photos, favourites and notifications.
Speaking with Wired, Castellarnau said one of the biggest changes has been to the favourites tab, which is now more focused on allowing users to save particular files for offline use, something which people were using it for anyway, and it will get a name change to reflect this in a future update.
Perhaps the best, but most obvious, feature to add was a search button for files at the top of the screen, which until now had been locked away in Settings, where many users wouldn’t think to access it.
As for photos, it’s now possible to press the ‘plus’ button on the bottom right-hand corner – much like Google have done for creating a new email in Gmail – that will automatically save a photo taken into the desired folder.
The final change was giving all control of sharing options into one single share button, which Dropbox said will offer richer info like file and folder locations, modification dates, and shared folder members in the file list.
