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When we announced that Dropbox was finally available for the iPhone and iPod touch, one of the first things we mentioned was the fact that it is only compatible with iPhone OS 3.1, leaving many of you jailbreakers hanging.  The developers did, however, give a fairly valid reason for the move, stating that:

The choice to go with 3.1 was because of a limitation with 3.0.1. Under 3.0.1 if you record video from within the Dropbox app that video couldn’t be saved to your iPhone photos directory, so if your upload was interrupted for any reason the video would be lost.

Even after this explanation, many Dropbox fans remained upset, and the last thing any developer wants is unhappy customers.  So, instead of forcing a select group of its users to go without, they decided to dig a little deeper to find a way to make everyone happy.

Arash F. from the Dropbox forums recently posted this message addressing the issue:

hi guys,
thank’s so much for all the praise and downloads (over 75k installs in the 24 hours after launch! :)

this is just the 1.0 and we realize there are many, many features to add and bugs to fix (zoom in photos, folder favoriting, etc etc :) . we also hear you loud and clear on the 3.0 restriction. we didn’t realise it’d create such an uprising!

we opted for 3.1 because API methods related to saving videos was not available on 3.0. this meant that videos taken within the app would be permanently lost in the event of a flaky/slow internet connection. this happened to us enough in testing that we felt it wasn’t a risk we wanted to expose to our users.

that said, it looks like there’s a workaround that’ll allow us to protect against this for 3.1 users while still allowing 3.0 users to use the app. we’re hoping to get a quick maintenance release out with a few small bug fixes + 3.0 support.

please continue to provide feedback – we’re listening!

Ahh, doesn’t that just make you want to give them a big ole heart hug?

Hopefully the update will be able to make it through Apple’s approval process rather quickly.  Dropbox, the iPhone OS 3.1 only version, is still available in the App Store for free.