Dropbox has officially confirmed that it’ll be shutting down two of its popular consumer-focused apps – the photo gallery app Carousel along with email client Mailbox. The move comes as the file hosting service company now shifts its focus to business customers so they can develop other new productivity tools.
“Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. 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,” said Dropbox in a blog post.
The company says that the email service Mailbox will shut down on February 26 while the photo-sharing service shuts down on March 31. However, users won’t lose their Carousel photos as they’ll still be there in their Dropbox. The company is now trying to integrate some of Carousel’s features into the core Dropbox app. Though, Mailbox users have to make alternative arrangements as the service that the Mailbox email client relies on will be shutting down.
To recall, Dropbox bought the Mailbox email service in March 2013, at a time when the iOS mail app was quite a hype with 250,000 users already. Though, since the acquisition, Dropbox failed to capitalize on the initial momentum the email service had garnered among its users.
A year after acquiring Mailbox, the company rolled out photo sharing app Carousel, designed to simplify the process of sharing and organizing of photos. It turned out to be a pretty useful tool though it wasn’t able to gain the kind of traction they’d hoped as not many users signed up for the app.
Going forward, Dropbox it seems will be focusing on its new collaboration service ‘Paper’ which essentially works in the same way as Google Docs.
“As we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email,” explains the blog post. 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.”
