Please support the new NSFileProviderSearching API that allows Spotlight in macOS Tahoe to search cloud files.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider/nsfileprovidersearching
Hey @Theodore S.1 - thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on this with us.
I've logged your feedback in our system and you can let us know if you have anything else to add.
Cheers!
@Theodore S.1 do you mean that the latest version of DropBox isn’t compatible? That it doesn’t work? Please explain better.
I’m one of those holding off on updating, and only because I’m worried that DropBox might cause me problems, as it already did some years ago.
All the other applications never give me any trouble – for example the Adobe suite, Microsoft stuff, and others too. Only DropBox always brings uncertainties with every major update.
Adding my voice in strong support of this. I run a design/dev consultancy with ~3.1 TB across active client work in Dropbox, and the lack of Spotlight indexing for online-only files has become a daily productivity hit since the File Provider migration on macOS Tahoe 26.
"Make available offline" isn't a workable answer at scale. My local drive is at 2.73 TB of 4 TB used and I can't pin the full account, which is precisely the use case smart sync exists to solve. Selective sync handles true archives, but the long tail of online-only files is exactly the set I most need searchable — I can't predict which old client folder I'll need to reference next.
Apple shipped NSFileProviderSearching in macOS 26 specifically to solve this. The API lets a provider serve Spotlight queries against unmaterialized files. Right now, that means Dropbox is functionally less searchable on macOS than iCloud Drive or OneDrive — a tough position for what used to be one of Dropbox's strongest differentiators.
Please prioritize this. It's a foundational workflow issue, and since the API is already shipped and documented, it feels squarely within reach. Happy to beta-test if that helps it land sooner.
