With the consumer-facing cloud storage space getting ever more crowded, Apple announced its own iCloud Drive offering just last month, Dropbox has not been sitting on its laurels, waiting for its 300 million customers to be lured away by rivals. For one thing it’s been tooling up with lots of acquisitions to flesh out a more fully featured platform of its own. Another path it’s evidently pursuing in a bid to survive the platform wars is partnerships. On that note, the company has just announced it’s teamed up with European carrier Deutsche Telekom to get its app preloaded on handsets in markets in Central and Eastern Europe starting in October.
Dropbox has partnered with Deutsche Telekom (DT) in a deal that will see the file-storing and sharing service preloaded on the smartphones of European consumers. Announcing the deal on Wednesday, Dropbox’s vice president, Marc Leibowitz, said the company considered the world’s entire online population of 3 billion people to be its potential audience, and said that similar partnerships with other operators were forthcoming. The deal with Deutsche Telekom is a significant step into Europe with a key operators, yet Leibowitz added that while several countries in central and eastern Europe would be covered by the deal, its home market of Germany is not included. “Deutsche Telekom is the first of many partnerships,” Leibowitz told the Guardian. “DT is making a big jump in testing this with us, and testing with their own users.” Dropbox said it expects the deal will reach millions of DT subscribers in Europe when it rolls out on customers’ Android handsets in October, as well as promoting Dropbox to existing Dropbox customers on Android and iOS devices.