The personal cloud storage market is a tough one these days, with a large number of companies competing to be the top dog for off-site file storage.
Following the hire of a former Skype project manager, Box is trying to get a leg up on its competition by redesigning its mobile offerings to feel sleeker and more full-featured.
To that end, the company has added a bunch of new functionality to its Android app, including the ability to resize the app’s home screen widget and view recently updated documents from the home screen widget. In addition, users who have downloaded files to edit offline will now receive a notification letting them know when changes have been made to that document and prompting them to update it.
They also added in support for multiple accounts, so it’s possible for you to flip back and forth between your personal and work Box accounts with minimal fuss. That’s better than Dropbox can say: its mobile apps focus on a single-account experience, and switching accounts is a somewhat cumbersome process.
Box is led by CEO Aaron Levie, who grew up on Mercer Island. Its mobile offerings are being now being spearheaded by David Still, the company’s new Vice President of Mobile. Still is a former Director of Project Management for Mobile at Skype.
“At Box, we are going ‘back to basics’ on the product side,” Still said in a blog post today. “In the short-term, we are looking extremely hard at how we simplify our product, make it easier to tackle the core use cases, and bring some elegance and visual beauty back into the mix.”
According to Still, a redesign of the company’s iPhone app is next on the docket for Box.
