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Dropbox has hit the 175-million-user mark, cofounder says

Dropbox's Drew Houston also unveiled a suite of new developer tools to help make cross-device syncing easier. 

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Dropbox
Dropbox, a service that allows users to store large files online and access them from multiple devices, continues to grow.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Back in November of last year, Drew Houston, the cofounder of the cloud company Dropbox, announced that, just over four years after its initial release, the platform had hit the 100-million-user mark. Now, less than a year later, team Dropbox says that number of users has risen to 175 million – with a staggering billion files synced each day.

Houston disclosed the new figure today at the company's developer conference, DBX, where he also announced plans to increase syncing compatibility across various devices, from smart phones to tablets. 

"[W]e want to be sure that stuff is always available, no matter if you’re on your laptop at work, a tablet on a plane, or a smartphone on the bus," Houston and his cofounder, Arash Ferdowsi, wrote in a blog post this morning. "Keeping devices and apps synced with your most up-to-date info has gone from 'nice-to-have' to essential, which creates a real challenge for the people developing apps." 

To that end, Dropbox will introduce a range of tools for developers, Houston and Ferdowsi wrote. 

Dropbox, of course, has plenty of competition in the cloud service market. Amazon offers cloud storage options, as does Microsoft (SkyDrive) and Apple (iCloud). Earlier this year, in an attempt to lure more users to its Drive platform, Google said it would allow users to choose how they allocate storage between Gmail and Google Drive. 

"With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail," Google's Clay Bavor wrote at the time. "Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want." 

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