Dropbox CEO Slams Apple's iCloud Over Closed Ecosystem

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston made an appearance at Mobile World Congress last week to talk about cloud storage, and he ended up discussing the various cloud services that manufacturers have been offering, saying that all of these exclusive cloud services lock users into using the service on just a small number of devices, usually those that are from the same company offering the cloud storage.

Houston mostly spoke in general terms, but he specifically called out Apple's iCloud service and said that iCloud users can only share files across iOS devices and not over Android devices. In other words, a lot of cloud storage services that companies and manufacturers roll out are not cross-platform compatible.

Houston says that "you shouldn't have to care about the logo on the back of your phone or computer, it should just work with everything you have." He certainly has a point there, and it's that kind of limitation that Dropbox wants "to help remove for people." Dropbox is compatible on almost all platforms, and you can share files across different mobile operating systems without any trouble.

Of course, Dropbox has scored partnerships with Samsung and HTC in the past, noting that these companies are the smart ones by not rolling out their own proprietary cloud service, but rather using Dropbox, which is more widely used anyway, with other 100 million users and over one billion files being uploaded every day across 500 million mobile devices.

[via Macworld]