Title: When you visit the Dropbox iOS app&#x27;s PDF viewer there&#x27;s a bright blue Open button. It shows &quot;Open with... Adobe Acrobat Reader, Add Text or Signature&quot; - it&#x27;s an affiliate revenue scheme dark pattern that sends you down a totally bad path. It caught my mom today, a Pro subscriber and a doctor, and she was just trying to look at health articles with her patients. Not &quot;sign up for an Adobe account?&quot; as she worriedly said on the phone today.<p>It&#x27;s rough. The app is full of crap like this, it&#x27;s not the first time it&#x27;s caught my mom - an educated person! There was smart sync (different than &quot;selective sync&quot;) being toggled on by default on new installs, which was horrible. Files that don&#x27;t open! Bad engineering, bad product design. There are the blocking notifications and prompts. The defaulting to show the Dropbox app instead of Finder. That&#x27;s just in the last two months.<p>I asked Dropbox CS people to &quot;disable product management.&quot; I joked in that thread that they were aspiring to be &quot;anti-mom.&quot;<p>I liked Dropbox, it was basically perfect in 2012, it&#x27;s why I pay for it so consistently, why I&#x27;ve gifted subs to people, why they keep paying, etc.<p>Drew, why are you ruining your product?<p>That aside, remember when Steve Jobs personally replied to people&#x27;s emails? There is no process for a normal person to connect with a real decision maker at giant tech companies anymore. It&#x27;s the most foreboding development in the tech industry. Delegating stuff like this to social media is bad management, and Paul Graham should be apoplectic that <i>despite</i> all of these dark patterns, Dropbox shares are still not trading above their IPO price. It&#x27;s bad business sense, it&#x27;s bad product. It&#x27;s just bad.
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