Sunsetting Maestral
As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire.
Via John Gruber (Mastodon):
I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. I might try moving everything from my Dropbox account to iCloud Drive. That certainly seems worth trying before I resort to going back to Dropbox’s own monstrosity of a Mac client.
[…]
In theory, because Maestral is open source, someone could fork it and keep it going.
I use Dropbox only for some relatively basic but necessary things, like hosting PDFs for this very website, which is why Maestral has been the perfect client for me. It is a testament to the effect of a good third-party app that I have stuck with Dropbox despite its corporate-focused strategy pivot.
I’ve switched to iCloud Drive, which seems better, but not better than Old Dropbox.
Previously:
- When Dropbox Spawns a Million Folders
- Backblaze No Longer Backs Up Dropbox
- Update on Cloud File Provider Extensions
- Dropbox on Ventura
- Dropbox and Maestral
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Whenever Syncthing is struggling to sync a file I need moved quickly, I drop a copy into my Dropbox folder because I know Maestral will take care of it instantly and provide a visual update (if I need one) while doing so. This is a shame. It'd be nice to use iCloud Drive more but I find the invisible interface and silent failures just maddening. At least Syncthing tells me why it's struggling whenever it does.
Wow. Apple really *have* succeeded in lowering everyone else to their own lamentable standards with the File Providers API, haven't they? Quite astonishing, really. And the perfect vindication of Steve Jobs from beyond the grave, sadly.
The only reason I can't use SyncThing is I want to sync stuff from several mirrors using NFC normalisation, and instead of just copying bytes of filenames as is, SyncThing throws a hissy-fit and just ignores the files entirely. Sigh. Maybe I'll fix my mirror scripts to work around this, but so far I've not got up the gumption. Otherwise, I definitely think SyncThing is the way to go, if you've got an always-on box somewhere.
Is there something about the Box service that it's not often (never?) mentioned when discussing Dropbox alternatives?
