Dropbox announces 'Dropbox Platform', aims to sync everything to the cloud

Dropbox at its first developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday announced a new initiative dubbed as 'Dropbox Platform' which is a suite of APIs that provides a cross-platform syncing solution for almost any form of data. The new platform was detailed at Dropbox's official blog.

According to Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox the new Dropbox Platform is built on top of the Sync API and has been designed to replace the physical hard drive and soon 'sync' will become the new save option for users.

The latest Dropbox Platform includes a new API called Datastore that allows apps to sync any form of data like contacts, to-do items and game state across different platforms. Other tools introduced at the event include 'Drop-in' which consists of a few lines of code that developers can use for cross-platform compatibility. There are two types of 'Drop-in' available, 'Chooser', which offers instant access to files in Dropbox to apps and another is 'Saver', which enables one-click save to the cloud.

"With the Datastore API, we're moving beyond files and providing a new model for effortlessly storing and syncing app data. When you use an app built with datastores your data will be up-to-date across all devices whether you're online or offline," said the blog post.

Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, founders of Dropbox, also used the blog post to recount their experience during initial days at Dropbox.

"Back in 2007, when it was just the two of us coding in an apartment, we never imagined that six years later there'd be over 175 million people using Dropbox and more than a billion files synced each day."

Third-party companies like Shutterstock, Yahoo Mail, FedEx and Mailbox are already signed up to use the new Dropbox Platform.