Dropbox Platform opens up cross-platform syncing for third party apps

Dropbox has revealed a new set of developer tools called Dropbox Platform, which aims to help make your data readily available across platforms and apps.

The company announced the new tool at its first Dropbox developer conference, DBX, which is being held in San Francisco this week.

The Sync API already lets developers access Dropbox's file syncing technology, but this latest announcement opens up far more possibilities.

For example, the new Datastore API allows app developers to sync app-specific data to the cloud. This could involve settings, contacts, to-do lists, sketches, and even game save files, to name just three.

It means that you could have an app installed on multiple devices and it would sync up across them without fuss. Potentially the most exciting aspect of this will be for mobile gamers, who will be able to start a game on their Apple iPad and continue it on their Android phone (or vice versa).

The other tool is Drop-in, which provides simple lines of code to add important Dropbox functionality to your app quickly and efficiently. The two initial examples provided are Chooser, which grants quick access to Dropbox files from within an app (for sharing files, for example), and Saver which - you guessed it - permits one-click saving to the cloud.

The important thing to note here is that Dropbox Platform doesn't provide a whole heap of brand new functionality, but it does make it a lot easier for app developers to sync data to the cloud. This should ensure that we see such features as standard in a lot more apps from now on.