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Is is possible that Dropbox provide infrastructure for a offline whiteboard app？

Hi,

I am building a offline whiteboard application, all-in-one offline visual suite like "offline miro + offline figma + offline canva",

I am fed up with the "Fileless" trend in recent years: Content are locked in SaaS, Files are highly abstracted, workflow are all done in Cloud.

It's more efficient in many work situations, but users lose ownership of their data

I wanted to use the existing dominant cloud to achieve such a seamless file-based asynchronous collaboration experience：

- With my whiteboard app, user exports a canvas file to Dropbox, and set it accessible and editable to anyone who know the link

- His friend got the dropbox link, open with my desktop app, modify, save, the file is automatically saved back to dropbox cloud

Is it possible to use Dropbox API to make this real?

I don't have to pay for an API and quota like that, right?

In my opinion,

Such a service is a very good thing for both the user and the platform,

Documents in cloud are more valuable when they are used more frequently

may be game changer for some dropbox users.

Any suggestion is appreciated, Thank you!

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Comments

Здравко

@andyyoung wrote:
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Is it possible to use Dropbox API to make this real?
...

Hi @andyyoung,

I don't know how much programming experience you have, but as seems you are "flying" too much in all those clouds (if I could say so). To one or other extends everything is abstracted. Let see the files you save on your drive. Are they one thing in all cases or just some abstraction thing? Do the data on the same file occupy the drive space in the same way while get saved the file on Windows, Mac, or Linux, for instance, or on the same OS but in case of drive formatted in different FS? Of course - No! In the same context the file itself is abstraction of stored data; it doesn't matter how exactly. Cloud services, like Dropbox, store such data in similar way. Of course the underlying storage is something private to the cloud provider, but exported API (Dropbox API in particular) is the way an user (including app developer, like you) to access stored data. Different providers provide different APIs and very often it's convenient additional level of abstraction letting access them using the same interface if you need to. Anyway, in all cases (local or cloud storage) you have access to file content and accompanying metadata. While the file content is always the same, the metadata set may differs between different ways of local storage of the same file as well as different cloud providers. You may need to consider it while developing, depending how much your application behavior depends on them. May be significant differences when a part of file content need to be changed. On local files and some cloud providers you may save only the changed part, but on others (like Dropbox) this is impossible - you need entire file in all cases. This may affect your application or not; you may need to consider it; you may need additional caching in some cases (depending on what kind of files you work on and how they are structured). So, despite for end user it looks highly abstracted, it's no so abstracted for developers (or not mandatory at least)! Devil is in details - details you must consider.

So, while keeping in mind and accounting all above - Yes, it's possible. 😉

@andyyoung wrote:
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I don't have to pay for an API and quota like that, right?
...

You don't need to pay for using API or quota. The available quota and API features depend on what is the user subscription (and how much the user pay of course). Depending on who is the actual user (from Dropbox point of view - when that's you), you may need to subscribe and pay; typically for server-side applications.

Hope this clarifies matter.

Greg-DB

The Dropbox API does offer an API that can be used for uploading and download files, and as Здравко said, use of the API itself is free; users can choose to pay for different plans.

Note that the API doesn't offer a way to upload new versions of a file just with a shared link though. Check out the Sharing Guide for information on the available sharing features.