Dropbox closing down Mailbox and Carousel

If you’ve gotten used to using Carousel to manage the photos you’ve saved on your Dropbox, or you’ve just gotten into the habit of swiping left or right (we’re not talking about Tinder, guys) when reviewing your email on Mailbox, then sadly, you soon won’t be doing those things any longer. Dropbox has just announced that they are closing down the two apps early next year, so they will be able to focus more on improving communication and collaboration on the main app.

Dropbox introduced Carousel in April of 2014 because they thought users would want a stand-alone app to manage their photos, away from the main cloud sharing app itself. But now the company admits that they realized that majority of users actually preferred having just one app to manage both files and photos and so by March 31 next year, they are shutting down Carousel for good. Of course no photos will be erased since they’re backed up in Dropbox anyway, and so you’ll be able to view and share photos in both web and mobile versions of the main app.

Meanwhile, when Mailbox first came out, it started a sort of revolutionary idea on how we deal with mobile email, dealing with them with just a few swipes on the screen. Others followed suit, including Gmail’s Inbox. But now, Dropbox will be closing down their email app by February 2016 as they want to focus on productivity features within the main app to streamline workflow and not switch from app to app. They’ve provided guides and export tools to help Mailbox users with the transition.

Dropbox says they are planning to take the important features from Carousel and put them to use in the main app. They will also take their learnings from Mailbox to create new features in Dropbox that will help users communicate better. These changes will be seen in the next few months.

SOURCE: Dropbox