Connecting to Dropbox on Apple’s mobile devices has been notoriously difficult. I am doing my best to make things work as described in the manual, but there have been issues outside my control that have made connections difficult.
Issues with the Dropbox App
When the Dropbox app is installed on your device, LivePrompter will automatically try to authenticate via the app instead of going through the Dropbox web page. This makes things easier, since logging on to Dropbox is typically already done – no need to type in your credentials and the two-factor code.
Unfortunately, some versions of the Dropbox app seem to be less willing to cooperate with the mechanism that connects LivePrompter and Dropbox. Essentially, there is a workflow in LivePrompter that will launch the Dropbox app and ask it to authenticate LivePrompter for access to your files. When this mechanism gets broken, some things can happen:
- LivePrompter won’t launch the Dropbox app – nothing happens when you tap “Log in to Dropbox”
- The Dropbox app opens, but doesn’t display the dialog asking you to allow access to LivePrompter
- The Dropbox app doesn’t send the authentication back to LivePrompter; you’re stuck in Dropbox and don’t return to LivePrompter
All these symptoms are indications that the communication between LivePrompter and Dropbox is somewhat broken. This can be a result of incompatible versions of either LivePrompter or Dropbox, or the result of something messed up in general on your iPad/iPhone that blocks this communication.
To address this, it is useful to go through a few steps:
- first, make sure that you are running the latest builds of both the Dropbox app and LivePrompter and update them to the latest version using the AppStore.
- if that doesn’t solve things, try un-installing and re-installing the Dropbox app and/or LivePrompter – start with the Dropbox app; that seems to solve more issues
- In some cases, the mechanism for intra-app communication was so messed up that even re-installing Dropbox and LivePrompter didn’t help – but users were able to get things going by factory-resetting their iPad and installing LivePrompter and Dropbox as the first apps on the “clean” device. This may be too drastic a step for you, so you might try the next option first:
- In a lot of cases, it helped to uninstall the Dropbox app and use the web-based method to authenticate LivePrompter. This will require you to log in to your Dropbox account in the browser (including the tedious “enter the code that we have sent you” mechanism); if everything is configured correctly, the browser should send you back to LivePrompter once you have authorized. After you have authorized LivePrompter, you can re-install the Dropbox app; LivePrompter will save the authorization token internally.
Issues with browser-based authentication
Browser-based authentification is the default mechanism when the Dropbox app is not installed. LivePrompter will launch your standard web browser and navigate to the Dropbox authentication page. There, you’ll need to log in with your Dropbox user credentials (user name and password), as well as go through the additional “enter the code we sent you” verification step. Once that is done, the Dropbox page should ask you to allow LivePrompter access to your files. Once you click the “Allow” button, you should be returned to LivePrompter, so the login token that has been generated can be stored in LivePrompter. Once that is done, you shouldn’t need to authenticate for future LivePrompter sessions.
Things that can typically go wrong:
- when you click on “Log in to Dropbox” in LivePrompter, nothing happens. That means that the mechanism to launch a browser from LivePrompter is broken
- the browser launches and login to Dropbox goes well, but the “LivePrompter would like to…” window doesn’t appear. Again, something has gone wrong either in the communication between LivePrompter and the browser, or the Dropbox page has issues.
- Login to Dropbox and Authorization of LivePrompter goes well, but when clicking the “Allow” button, nothing happens, and you don’t get returned to LivePrompter. That means that the mechanism to launch LivePrompter is somehow broken, either because of a corrupted installation of LivePrompter or an issue with your browser. Sometimes there are security settings that get in the way of the browser launching other applications – this can be particularly nasty on some customized Android versions…
And of course, there can be issues logging in to Dropbox, independent of LivePrompter – that is something you may get out of the way by making sure you can log in successfully just using your browser and the Dropbox web site, without LivePrompter involved.
To address these issues:
- make sure you are running the latest version of LivePrompter, and that your system is generally up-to-date
- use the standard browser for your device (Chrome on Android, Safari on iOS) – these are the ones I test with; I’m not attempting to support a list of alternative browsers and their interactions with LivePrompter
- Uninstalling and re-installing LivePrompter can help in some cases
- When the return from the browser to LivePrompter is blocked by security settings, installing the Dropbox app and authenticating that way can sometimes help
- When the communication between the browser and other apps is generally messed up, so that apps can’t be launched from the browser, the situation may require a factory reset and re-installation (if you’re up to going through all that…).
Getting additional help
This should solve most of the authentication issues – if you have tried everything and things are still not working, then post a note at the support forum. But please explain in individual steps what of the above you have tried and what the result was – this makes it a lot easier to understand what is going on and how to possible help you – instead of just posting “I STILL CAN’T CONNECT TO DROPBOX…”