Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Dropboxer. My opinions are my own.
I worked on the Desktop Client team. When I left Dropbox, the team was trying to move to a 2 week build cycle. The big focus at Dropbox was to increase the speed of iteration in order to get features and bugfixes in front of user eyes as quickly as possible. One of the compromises there was to cut back on the amount of time and energy the team spent on constructing public changelogs. I wasn't a huge fan of this change, but I understand the argument that it's probably better for the engineers and PMs to work on features and bugs than public documentation for the beta builds.
There was also a faction that wanted to completely get rid of the forum builds. Most of the engineers that I knew were strongly against this, as some really valuable first-touch feedback came out of forum builds.
I'm not going to defend forced automatic updates, though. I lost that argument, at least on Mac/Windows. :(
I worked on the Desktop Client team. When I left Dropbox, the team was trying to move to a 2 week build cycle. The big focus at Dropbox was to increase the speed of iteration in order to get features and bugfixes in front of user eyes as quickly as possible. One of the compromises there was to cut back on the amount of time and energy the team spent on constructing public changelogs. I wasn't a huge fan of this change, but I understand the argument that it's probably better for the engineers and PMs to work on features and bugs than public documentation for the beta builds.
There was also a faction that wanted to completely get rid of the forum builds. Most of the engineers that I knew were strongly against this, as some really valuable first-touch feedback came out of forum builds.
I'm not going to defend forced automatic updates, though. I lost that argument, at least on Mac/Windows. :(