Child Item

The install link on the Dropbox site sometimes redirects to the beta version of the desktop app

Andy T.

The virtual links to download dropbox

https://www.dropbox.com/download

https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64

sometimes (like once in 30 tries) redirect automatically to the latest BETA build instead of the latest STABLE build.

No clue why, but watch these for a couple of minutes and you'll probably see build 238.3.5977 appear

while true ; do curl -sI "https://www.dropbox.com/download" | grep '^location: https:' ; sleep 1.5 ; done

while true ; do curl -sI "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | grep '^location: https:' ; sleep 1.5 ; done

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Web

Install

Insightful

Closed - Not for right now

Comments

Jay

Hi @Andy T., thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Does this behavior only occur for the Linux version of the Dropbox desktop application, or does it happen for the Windows and Mac versions (when changing the second URL you posted).

Out of curiosity, may I ask how you noticed this, since most people don't attempt to redownload the desktop app every few seconds?

Keep me posted with any updates or new details!

Andy T.

yes, for windows too, just tried manually both

https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=win&type=full

and

https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=win

and got the beta after a few tries.

As to why: I tend to avoid automatic updates as I like to know what I am running. I therefore download manually when necessary, running my curl script every week or so just to check if there is actually a new version compared to what I have, and downloading it if there is. But over the years I have noticed that the new build number can go up and down, which made no sense. Finally I decided to investigate and eventually realised the new version was sometimes the beta, then went back to stable.

So is this dropbox trying to get unwitting guinea pigs? Or is it something about my location?

Andy T.

238.3.5977 = beta build

Jay

By default, the website link should only automatically download the stable app, and without any URL changes, for the correct OS.

I will forward this information to my colleagues to investigate this matter further.

In the meantime, you can change your URL slightly to add the build, like so:

https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64&build=stable

This should always download the full and current stable build for you, and it should work for the full offline installers for Mac and Windows as well. Changing 'stable' to 'beta' will immediately get you the beta build.

If possible on your end, could you test that stable URL I provided to ensure that you don't accidentally get a beta build, even though 'stable' was chosen explicitly?

Andy T.

Yes, if I add "&build=stable" explicitly I do always seem to get what I asked for :-)