Struggling to hold and increase its user base, Dropbox is shutting down its email and photo apps, Mailbox and Carousel.
The company is looking to streamline its core business and is looking to focus and build on its collaboration service, Paper.
“Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi said in the blog post announcement. “It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.”
Dropbox acquired Mailbox in 2013, which at the time of its launch had a lot of hype as it created a simple interface for reading email. Carousel also comes from startup acquisitions, and is an Android and iOS app that organized photos and videos from a user’s Dropbox with the swipe of a finger.
Mailbox will shut down on February 26, 2016, and Carousel will end on March 31, 2016.
“Over the past year and a half, we’ve learned the vast majority of our users prefer the convenience and simplicity of interacting with their photos directly inside of Dropbox. With this in mind, we’ve had to make a difficult decision,” the Carousel team said in a blog post announcement.
Carousel users won’t have to worry about their photos getting deleted, as they will still remain in Dropbox where they always have been. But make sure you go through Carousel’s Help Center if you have photos received through conversations or shared albums that you want to save. Carousel’s key features will be baked into the core Dropbox app in the coming months, but the team didn’t specify exactly what would be integrated.
Since Mailbox is a client that worked on Gmail, you won’t have to worry about losing data when it shuts down.
“As we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email. We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place,” the Mailbox team said in a blog post announcement.
Still, the company has made a few guides and export tools in case you want to export your auto-swipe patterns or take a look at what exactly you can expect when the service ends.
Dropbox is continuing its focus to “fix email” and build on collaboration with Dropbox Paper, which is looking to compete with services like Google Docs and Evernote. Paper lets users import photos, videos, and sound bites to a document, and other collaborators can be tagged in the document through an @ mention. A feature called Attribution highlights text to identify who wrote what, and similar to Google Docs, collaborators can comment on the right side and even send emojis. Dropbox Paper is still in open beta; you can sign up for the waiting list here.
