Dropshare for macOS User Survey 2019 Results

June 30th, 2019

From February until June 2019, we ran the 2019 User Survey with Dropshare for macOS users. The application would ask frequent users once to voluntarily participate in the survey, which collected usage information like number of connections set up, number of uploads in history, and preferences.

Based on the survey results, we'd like to focus our development efforts on the features that are most interesting for our users. However, we'd also like to share some insights of the survey with you. We've received feedback from over 100 frequent Dropshare users in the last months.

Average Uploads and Connections

The average user on macOS has 350 uploaded files in the upload history, and two connections set up. While Dropshare is great at handling several different connection setups in your workflow, the result shows that users mostly focus on two different connections. We interpret these as private and work related scenarios. Interestingly, only around one in ten of the participants is using the Connection Chooser to select which connection to use for uploading.

Connection Types

As you know, Dropshare is very flexible and supports a variety of storage providers. We're happy to see that Dropshare Cloud is the second-most used provider among the survey participants.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service is the leading storage provider used with Dropshare on macOS. We'll be looking into new features of Amazon Web Services to see how we can improve your sharing experience with S3 further.

Preferences

The app is heavily customizable so it adopts to your workflow perfectly. We'll share some of the favorite preferences below:

  • Screenshot Format: PNG is 4-times more popular than JPG
  • Keyboard Shortcuts: More than half of the participants have set up a shortcut for selection-based screenshots, and one-third are using the annotation shortcut
  • Annotation: Speaking of annotations, the build-in annotation tool is the most used (with over 80%) followed by Preview, Skitch and Annotate
  • Landing Pages: One-third of our users prefer to upload with landing pages, whereas over 80% are using a custom template
  • Dropshare Zone: Apparently an interesting feature - one out of four participants is using the handy upload zone on their desktop

Dropshare Mirror

A few years back, we've introduced Dropshare Mirror - a way to capture screenshots directly from your wire-connected iOS or Android device and upload them with Dropshare. According to the survey, the feature is only rarely used. We might consider to remove it from future releases.

Screen Recordings

Creating screen recordings as movie or GIF file is a well-established feature. One-fith of the participants are using a keyboard-shortcut to start screen recordings, over 50% are using GIFs as their preferences.

URL Shorteners

Using a service to shorten long URLs (which you deal with when using storage services) is a frequently used feature. Besides the favored build-in service dsh.re, Rebrandly and custom integrations share their portion. Two-thirds of the participants prefer to use the original URLs for sharing though.

Dropshare Sync

We've retired Dropshare Sync when we released the 5.0 update of the app, and replaced it with an iCloud-based and more seamless solution. Only 10% of the participants decided to opt-out, the majority is relying on the improved synchronisation.

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