Dropbox expands its limits !!!!

In a bid to become omnipresent, Dropbox unveils tools to help developers sync apps across mobile platforms. Developers can now sync structured data which was not normally accessible for file synchronization.

Drop box, the fast-growing file-synching and file-sharing service, today announced new tools that could help the company become a crucial assistant to developers in an increasingly uneven mobile ecosystem.
It introduced new tools for programmers that could make it more commonplace for playing games and using apps to be a picture perfect experience across devices.

Since developers encounter many difficulties when trying to make apps work together across platforms as there are thousands of details they must get right for it to work. At the company’s first developer conference on July 9, Houston introduced a new Dropbox platform Data store API , which includes a way for developers to easily allow their Android and iOS apps to sync with each other by having Drop box do what it already does—sync and store data online—but with the structured bits of data modified within apps as you use them, rather than just for files like photos and Word documents. Data store will be integrated into the applications themselves running on various devices, so users will be able to share files uninhibited by platform or hardware. Users will also be able to share more files types: contacts, to-do lists, and game states are three major types of data that will now be hosted by the storage service.

  Drop box also introduced Chooser for iOS and Android, a UI component that provides easy access to its files, and Saver, a UI component for saving files to it from the Web and mobile websites. It enables your app to get files from it without having to worry about the complexities of implementing a file browser, authentication, or managing upload and storage.

Where Dropbox could really benefit from these new services is in the potential interest from the enterprise: Companies looking to exchange files but not be bothered with internal exchange installations could likely see dropbox new features  as the perfect platform. Though security, as always, will be the operative question here.

The major platform companies -- Apple, Google and Microsoft -- would prefer that their customers use their own storage services. So it is that Apple offers i Cloud, Google offers Google Drive and Microsoft offers Sky Drive, each of which has its own APIs for integration with third-party apps.it will definitely face an uphill battle convincing mobile game developers to rely on its Data store API rather than APIs for Apple Game Center or Google Play Services, both of which support game state saving as well as other game-oriented functions.

While drop box is just one of many cloud storage and file-synching services, it may have the chops and the momentum to make this ambitious plan work. Since launching in late 2008, the service has grown tremendously—it reached 100 million users in November, and has added an additional 75 million since then. Each day, users save over a billion files.  If sharing live data is the core concept of the cloud, then with the beginning of device-agnostic storage, drop box is well on its way to topping other cloud providers.