A year on Rosetta: Dropbox's slow Apple Silicon support angers Mac users
2020–2022
After Apple Silicon Macs shipped in late 2020, Dropbox went nearly a year without a native build, forcing its always-on sync daemon to run under Rosetta 2 emulation — to mounting user fury — before committing to a native release in 2022.
What happened
Apple's first M1 Macs shipped in November 2020, but Dropbox had no native arm64 build of its desktop client for nearly a year. In the interim the app — and its constantly running background sync daemon — could only run under Rosetta 2, Apple's x86 emulation layer. Users complained that running an always-on emulated process hurt battery life, memory usage, and performance, especially as competing apps moved to native or beta Apple Silicon builds.
The frustration boiled over in October 2021, when native support remained merely a community-votable 'idea' on Dropbox's forum. Even after the request gathered hundreds of votes, a Dropbox representative said the feature 'is going to need a bit more support,' prompting public anger — including from prominent developer Mitchell Hashimoto. CEO Drew Houston apologized publicly, and Dropbox said it had an internal M1 build in testing and was committed to releasing native Apple Silicon support in the first half of 2022, which it ultimately delivered.
Impact
For a utility expected to run quietly in the background at all times, a year of x86 emulation on new hardware was a tangible reliability and efficiency cost that users felt daily. The episode also became a flashpoint in criticism that Dropbox was slow to maintain its core desktop client, treating a fundamental platform transition as a low-priority feature request rather than essential upkeep — feeding a broader narrative that the company was deprioritizing the sync product that built it.