MANILA, Philippines – Fans of Dropbox, the cloud storage and file synchronization service, may look to a number of improvements on the horizon. Dropbox began its first Developer Conference, DBX, on July 9, giving Dropbox a chance to tout its achievements and developers the opportunity to see what they can do to make Dropbox even better.

At the event, CEO Drew Houston announced that the company now has 175 million users, up from around 100 million in November 2012.

Mailbox, an iOS email app Dropbox acquired this year, also received a new version soon after an announcement by Houston. On its blog, Mailbox announced integation with Dropbox, allowing users to easily send Dropbox attachments using the Mailbox application.

The company also launched a number of new application programing interfaces (APIs) and code plugins, called Drop-ins, that would allow developers to integrate some new features into apps that use the Dropbox platform.

The first API, called Datastore, is what Dropbox calls “a new model for effortlessly storing and syncing app data.” Apps with data that use the Datastore API can now be made up-to-date across all devices whether a user is online or offline.

“Imagine a task-tracking app that works on both your iPhone and the web,” Dropbox explains. “If it’s built with the Datastore API, you can check off items from your phone during a cross-country flight and add new tasks from your computer and Dropbox will make sure the changes don’t clobber each other.”

Two Drop-ins, known as Chooser and Saver, have also been added to the development arsenal. The Chooser Drop-in lets people access the files in their Dropboxes from web and mobile apps. Saver lets users save files from services that use the Drop-in to Dropbox with a single-click. The functionality of these two Drop-ins is already available in Yahoo! Mail, ShutterStock, and Mailbox. – Rappler.com