The most popular approach turned out to be embedding the Dropbox SDK in third-party apps, allowing them to access, modify, and sync a common set of files stored in the user’s Dropbox account.īy virtue of being a web-based service that communicated natively with any app that integrated with the SDK, Dropbox could be treated as the “one truth” living in the cloud, relieving users of the need to keep track of multiple copies of documents and their version history. Given Apple’s reluctance to provide a better solution, hundreds of apps implemented third-party alternatives to mitigate the problems inherent to file management and inter-app communication on iOS. ![]() That design decision, a byproduct of iOS’ sandboxed nature, meant that users had to rely on features such as the Open In… menu to exchange documents between multiple apps as a result, it was easy to end up with multiple duplicates of the same file scattered throughout the system, leading to confusion and wasting precious local storage. Even though it’s still far from an ideal state of feature parity with macOS, file management on iPad is in much better shape today than it was seven years ago.įrom the iPad’s debut in 2010 until the launch of iCloud Drive with iOS 8 in 2014, the most controversial aspect of file management on iPad was the system’s reliance on so-called “app silos”: rather than storing their documents in a centralized location such as the Mac’s Finder, each iPad app had to hold the user’s documents and data in its own container, which was entirely shut off from the containers of other installed apps. ![]() Before iOS 11 and the Files app, file management had long been considered an area where the iPad could not measure up to the traditional computing environment of a Mac.
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