Skip to main content

Dropbox is shutting down Mailbox and Carousel

dropbox shut down mailbox carousel app
Image used with permission by copyright holder
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.

Recommended Videos

“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.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

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.

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
Classic BlackBerries are finally losing suppport as company shuts down services
BlackBerry Key2. Credits: BlackBerry official.

After kickstarting the smartphone era, BlackBerry's classic devices and services are finally shutting down. No, not the Android-powered modern BlackBerries such as the KeyOne, Key2, and Key2 LE, but anything that ran a BlackBerry-branded operating system. Whether this is a classic QWERTY keyboard powered by BlackBerry 7, or the iPhone-inspired BlackBerry 10, or even the forgotten BlackBerry PlayBook OS -- it's all shutting down this month.
"As another milestone in the BlackBerry journey, we will be taking steps to decommission the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1, and earlier versions, with an end of life or termination date of January 4, 2022," the company announced. "As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS, and 911 functionality. We have chosen to extend our service until then as an expression of thanks to our loyal partners and customers."
BlackBerry bids farewell to its longtime customers. Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
It's the end of an era for what was once a distinguished product that defined the market a decade ago. Even predating iMessage, the BlackBerry instant messaging service -- BBM -- was a great selling point for the product line. As iOS, Android, and WhatsApp began to dominate, BlackBerry devices began to fall by the wayside.
The company tried to rejuvenate its smartphone business by launching its own touchscreen phones and later its own operating system in 2013, but had little success. Unable to keep up,ity stopped the creation of smartphones in 2016 and licensed services to TCL Ltd. between 2016 to 2020. BlackBerry promised to launch a smartphone by the end of 2021 in partnership with OnwardMobility, but that hasn't panned out. 
The company has now shifted its focus to selling software. It briefly had a nostalgia-fueled increase in its share price this year, which later nearly returned to its original price. While the market has been saturated with multiple companies claiming a stake in the smartphone pie, hopefully, BlackBerry manages to return to some form of relevance with its current partnership. 

Read more
Drinkworks is shutting down, reimbursing customers
Drinkworks Home Bar by Keurig Press Shots 2 of 5

In an era where it seems more and more of us want fancy food, drinks, and services at home -- and instantly -- it may come as a shock that Drinkworks is shutting down operations.

Drinkworks is a ready-made bartending machine that’s able to deliver custom cocktails at the push of a button. Despite the apparent ease of having a countertop mixologist, Drinkworks says it will no longer be selling new bar machines, and it will stop producing drink pods too, though it will continue to sell off stock on its website and through retailers until the supplies are gone.

Read more
Instagram is shutting down its Threads messaging app
Instagram welcome screen on iPhone.

It looks like Instagram’s stand-alone messaging app, called Threads, will soon be shutting down as part of an ongoing consolidation of messaging apps by Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook that owns Instagram).

Threads arrived in 2019 as a stand-alone alternative to direct messaging in the Instagram app. Basically, Threads was to Instagram what Facebook Messenger is to Facebook.

Read more