Earlier today, Dropbox announced that Mailbox and Carousel are being discontinued:
The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people and their work will continue to have an impact. We’ll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live—in the Dropbox app. We’ll also be using what we’ve learned from Mailbox to build new ways to communicate and collaborate on Dropbox (you can see early signs of this focus with Paper).
I’m like many, many other people — Dropbox is my filesystem. There’s very little on my MacBook Pro’s SSD that isn’t in Dropbox. My documents and my photos are there, in addition to files I share with people I work with and know.
As such, the health of Dropbox is of extreme interest to me. As much as these apps were loved by their users, it’s clear that the company is moving in another direction. While things like Paper don’t make much of a difference to me, knowing that Dropbox will reliably sync my files, be easy to use on iOS and continue to be around is important to me. If Mailbox and Carousel had to go to make that possible, then so be it.
That said, Mailbox is now on a long list of smaller projects swallowed up by big companies just to be shut down later. That’s always rough to see.