Maestral, the Open Source Splendidly Simple Mac Dropbox Client, Has Been Retired

Maestral developer Sam Schott, on the Maestral website:

As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire.

Schott, on Maestral’s GitHub project page:

As of 2026-07-28, this project is archived. It’s been a fun challenge to develop a syncing client, but unfortunately, I find too little time to invest in Maestral these days. I’ve also moved away from using Dropbox myself.

Maestral will still remain usable in the medium term, but will no longer be actively maintained or receive updates.

You get what you pay for, and Maestral is free of charge and open source. But man, this is a real bummer. I absolutely love Maestral. It restores Dropbox to its original vision — a folder on my Mac that syncs. Nothing at all like the bloated app that Dropbox’s first-party Mac client has grown into. And it doesn’t use any of MacOS’s modern File Provider APIs, which in my experience provide me with no benefits that I want, and saddle me with much needless complexity that I don’t. With Maestral, it’s just a quiet app that runs in the background, consumes preciously few CPU and memory resources, it just syncs a folder of your choosing to your Dropbox account. I of course chose ~/Dropbox/. It’s always been super robust for me. It’s not a hack — it syncs to Dropbox using Dropbox’s APIs.

As of today Maestral continues to work just fine. I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. I might try moving everything from my Dropbox account to iCloud Drive. That certainly seems worth trying before I resort to going back to Dropbox’s own monstrosity of a Mac client.

In theory, because Maestral is open source, someone could fork it and keep it going. But my impression has always been that it was a one-man show from Schott, and if he’s personally no longer using Dropbox, it’s easy to see why he’s lost interest in maintaining Maestral.

So it goes.

★ Monday, 6 July 2026