Dropbox took the covers off a long awaited feature in the form of a Sync API for mobile developers, which is now available on iOS and Android. The new API now allows app developers to pull content directly from Dropbox and thus makes it very easy to build their very own Dropbox clients within the app without any complications. The best part about the new API is the fact that it automatically handles caching, syncing and detects when an Internet connection is available so that new content can be synced back. This will not only allow the app developer to deal with online content transparently, but the app will be able to treat these files as though they were stored on the phone locally. The new API apparently also simplifies code by automating most of the operations like tracking changes and re-trying a failed download, which had to be done manually before and took a lot of effort. This is expected to cut the client integration code for developers taking advantage of Dropbox into half of what it was earlier, if the blog post on Dropbox website is to be believed. This new strategy will give a huge boost to the developer ecosystem of the cloud storage service and is thus aimed at making the platform even more ubiquitous and in the process gain more integration points to interact with the user. This will obviously provide more opportunities for Dropbox to improve its user base and attract more app developers to incorporate Dropbox integration within their apps. The Dropbox website has already been populated with documentation and example apps are also available with the SDK download. The team has also put together an excellent tutorial for getting started with using the API on both the Android and iOS development platforms.
