Dropbox Sync Error: Failed to list remote data folder in Dropbox.

Hi Ben.

So, let me get this straight: unless someone upgrades, your software's main selling feature is broken? WITHOUT notifying your customers? Are you actively trying to turn people away from your product? I've been a loyal customer for many years now and this is not what I expected from your company.

Alex

@Ben and @brenty,

I want to come to the defense of @mrengy (OP) and @labrinidis . This is not a rant as much as a constructive heads up that your communication strategy within the app and perhaps your architectural decisions need to be reconsidered. I don't discount that a newer version of 1PW may incorporate some of these suggestions.

Please take into account the perspective of the customer. First, I have encountered the exact same problem as the OP. All of a sudden, after years of reliable syncing, without warning my iOS app is way out of sync with my Mac (which I rarely fire up..its a business travel-only device).

For brevity's sake, take my word that I have good reasons to be using old iOS and MacOS X versions. I acknowledge that doing so puts me at risk of attacks like heartbleed, meltdown, spectre, etc. As much as your corporate decisions force users to move forward into the next upgrade cycle, other companies' decisions force a user to remain in the past. I will lose the use of certain apps if I upgrade iOS not to mention lose performance, battery life, and money. Of all 3rd party iOS developers, Agilebits is the most draconian at forcing the user into an involuntary upgrade cycle at great cost and inconvenience. **You need to educate the user as to why you are so aggressive about upgrading because you may have good security reasons. Maybe there is a blog post I missed but life is busy. Ideally, you would not force people to upgrade.**

The issues:

1) There was no upfront indication that logins were out of sync on the iPhone (iOS 9.3.3) vs Mac (10.8.5). Unfortunately, it is possible to continue inputing numerous new logins into 1PW on both devices and be completely ignorant that there is a sync error (and according to you, I've been experiencing this sync error for months... since the Dropbox API deprecation). That means a headache of reconciling new-ish passwords from both vaults. In other words this is not an issue of restoring or repairing. Its an issue of reconciling.

Even after I first realized that there were problems logging into a site, I didn't know the disparity between the number of logins in the iPhone vault and Mac vault was so large. I suggest throwing up a dialog box saying that "There was a sync error", no matter what the cause, to alert of an issue immediately so I would have at least known to stop inputing new logins and data. From the cautionary dialog box, the user should then be guided to further information such as a web page which they can then choose to skip if they are in a hurry to proceed to use your app in a read only mode. In my case, 29 login items are out of sync (and I don't know which ones without sorting by date). Only after I started digging into the issue in Settings>Sync>Items did I realize that more than one or two login items are out of sync. A more visible/front page location for item count would reveal that there was a major disparity. Consider that 1PW for Mac and 1PW for iOS could handshake via Dropbox and confirm that all systems are synchronized as an indicator light to the user. In other words, you need a "check engine" light on 1PW for iOS, Mac, etc. Maybe touching this indicator would show a list of devices and how out of sync they are with each other. Does this already exist in 1PW somewhere?

2) After I encountered head scratching problems...successful login here, unsuccessful there, I then had to manually diagnose the error (I see all of the OP's screens on my iPhone). I'm sure a lot of people got lost at this stage unless they knew to look into Settings>Sync.

3) I googled the error: 'Failed to list remote data folder in Dropbox' and this very thread appears waaaay down the list of search results. In fact, the top post on Google returns a 2 year old thread on discussions.agilebits that offers outdated and incomplete/irrelevant advice. So then I was in dangerous territory of carrying out an obsolete solution that won't work and may cause me data loss (because this is not a matter of restoring from backup, its reconciliation). I suggest using more unique/articulate error strings so that obsolete discussion threads are not dredged up by customers.

4) @brenty directs blame at both Dropbox for changing its API and the customer for not upgrading to newer hardware/iOS. First, Dropbox gave Agilebits a full year of warning that the API v1 would be deprecated...it says so on the link in your comment. Dropbox even had a button to make sure you, Agilebits, acknowledged the change was coming and could wreak havoc if ignored. A solution would have been to roll in Dropbox API v2 into 1PW 6.5.x so that iOS 9 users would never have hit this major bug. You had a year to do this and I doubt there were technical reasons that would prevent API v2 from being implemented in 1PW for iOS v6.5.x.. In your favor, Apple may not let you update older versions of the app because of their own controversial policies.

Alternatively, you certainly could have have warned users many months in advance that their current hardware and software would no longer work reliably without 'spamming' those that had already upgraded. At minimum (and there may be more elegant ways by additionally using iOS Notification Center), Agilebits should have baked in a "Dropbox sync will fail on 7/1/17" dialog box into 1PW and then pushed that out as an update on the AppStore. That dialog box could have been coded to only show where relevant (–e.g., iOS 9) to avoid spamming those that won't be hit by the bug. This dialog box would have been a heads up to me that it was crucial to upgrade my hardware and software by a given deadline instead of the morass I'm in now. Abandoning users and moving ahead was really careless and pour form for a company that has been largely exemplary. If I weren't a developer, I would probably lose my patience and look for a competing PW manager (and to be honest, your new subscription model has me wondering if there are better options).

I understand that you have a very complex product to maintain but your average user will definitely not be aware of that complexity (because 1PW is mostly elegant). Instead, users in our position will see that they paid ~$80 and got left behind. That said, I now see why you opted to create your own cloud sync platform because Dropbox and iCloud are not only potential competitors but also may break at any second. The problem with your 1PW cloud is that I don't want to send my passwords to the very company that both generates and stores them for me locally. It seems like a security risk if there were ever a backdoor in the 1PW. Merely hypothetically, for the sake of an intellectual conversation, uploading my passwords to your 1PW cloud puts the fox in charge of the hen house so customers should always have working cloud and WiFi sync alternatives. The reality is that I believe you guys have made things more secure for me and I'm very grateful but this is an unfortunate headache. Trying to keep all devices in the same window of hardware/software compatibility is getting really onerous.

so if I've upgraded my iPhone to the latest OS and the 1Password app on my iphone is at version 6.5.2 then should Dropbox work, or will it not? I've been receiving the same "Failed..." error message and ignored it, but now have a new computer so need to get the Dropbox version up to date so I can install it on my new Windows computer using 1Password4.