Dropbox is doing away with Mailbox, the email app it acquired in March 2013, and Carousel, the company's attempt at a standalone photo management app. The company says that it's making this decision now to focus more directly on the primary Dropbox app and the collaborative features it's known for. "The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people and their work will continue to have an impact," wrote Dropbox's founder / CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in a blog post. "We’ll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live — in the Dropbox app. We’ll also be using what we’ve learned from Mailbox to build new ways to communicate and collaborate on Dropbox."

Mailbox will shut down on February 26th, with Carousel following the next month on March 31st. Dropbox says it's giving Carousel extra time so that users can download their photos and move them elsewhere if they so choose. "If you have conversations or shared albums you want to save from Carousel, we’ll provide a simple export tool early next year," the company notes.

Both apps have seen little development in recent months, allowing competition from bigger rivals to move ahead of Dropbox's software. Mailbox was effectively abandoned on both iOS and Android months ago, and even the Twitter account has gone silent. Other third-party email apps like Microsoft's Outlook and Google Inbox have built upon the unique swipe and time management features that Mailbox introduced. The company acknowledges as much, saying "many of its innovations are now ubiquitous across the industry."

Similarly, Google Photos and Apple Photos have made Dropbox's Carousel app somewhat useless by comparison. Dropbox says it'll bring some of Carousel's better features to the main app "in the coming months." So there's the closure you might've been looking for; it just would've been nice to see this happen a few months sooner.

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