ExpanDrive lets you effortlessly access and manage cloud files, remote servers, and WebDAV storage right from your desktop. No sync, no clutter–just a seamless, unified workspace.
Connect Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, and more as local drives.
Completely free for personal use. No hidden costs, no compromises.
Hey all! This is something we've been working on for a while now. It's the future of native cloud storage on macOS.
Third party kernel extensions on macOS are on the way out.
On M1 machines any third party kernel extension requires a reboot into recovery mode, lowering the security settings, and then finishing the install.
This is a terrible and unfriendly model for users (by design). This is the primary reason these Google/Box/etc aren’t shipping M1 versions of their software.
But that’s okay, they’ve got something better they’re working on. Just keeping it a little quiet right now since it’s not 100% done.
The replacement for apps like Google & Box Drive (and everyone else) is their new File Provider framework (https://developer.apple.com/docu...), which they quietly launched but didn’t publicize at all. It’s basically a technology that enables something like Dropbox Smart Sync (project infinite) built directly into macOS fully managed by APFS.
Benefits
1. All on demand, driven by placeholders. “regular” sync downloads contents ahead of time, this is not the case with file providers. It’s more like network filesystems in this regard
2. Doesn’t eat up free space. Providers can mark their content as “evictable” which lets APFS know it can toss out the data if space gets low. But what I think is extra interesting is that when you mark the content as evictable it doesn’t even register as being used against free space. You could bring down a 10GB file from the cloud and your free space remains the same
3. Integrated with all the higher level APIs so that applications that open a file with swift/objective C don’t beachball while waiting for a download (for an open) to complete. They appropriate waits and expectations are in there now
4. All sorts of other stuff, happy to keep going
ExpanDrive