Dropbox Now Has 175 Million Users, Up From 100M In November 2012

“Today is about making life easier for all of you” said CEO Drew Houston to launch his company Dropbox’s conference. The company now has 175 million users, up from 100 million in November 2012. DBX also saw the launch of several new APIs for the 100,000 apps on the Dropbox platform

The platform, in fact, seemed to be the theme of Houston’s keynote. Unifying your data across all the apps and devices you use is the goal. Houston said “We have all these companies making all this amazing stuff, but they’re punching each other in the face.” He went on to explain that your phone and your apps are new little cracks for your stuff to fall into, where your stuff can get trapped. Dropbox wants to make it all instantly accessible from anywhere.

Houston said that while there wouldn’t be anyone skydiving into the conference hall in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, he did tell us to reach under our seats to find a promo card for 100 gigabytes of Dropbox storage for life.

Announcements at the event included the Datastore API for letting apps save and protect user data added or changed while their device is offline. Meanwhile, the new Drop-Ins with native Chooser and Saver let apps easily pull in your files from your Dropbox into their apps. Houston says “Today is the first day of your life where you don’t have to worry about this stuff. You can focus on making a great app.”

Other announcements during the DBX keynote included a new version of Yahoo Mail for Android with a Dropbox integration was announced, and that Dropbox acquisition Mailbox is releasing a new iOS version with Dropbox integration too.

Still, most stunning might be Dropbox’s growth. It reportedly turned down some serious acquisition offers and the bet on itself seems to be paying off. Days storage is no longer an nerdy niche service. It’s becoming a necessity of modern life.

Houston’s watchwords for the day, the new mantra of the company he kept repeating, was “sync not save”. The idea is that Dropbox is going beyond just storing your files. It’s about creating a real-time two-way connection between your data and the cloud so you never lose, misplace, or can’t access your digital accoutrements.