Dropbox daemon not installed after latest update

[alexreinking]

After upgrading to the latest flatpak, I noticed my indicator icon had disappeared. Then I tried running Dropbox from the command line. Here's what I see:

alex@alex-desktop:/var/home/alex$ flatpak run com.dropbox.Client start
Starting Dropbox...dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/cryptography.hazmat.bindings._rust.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/apex._apex.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/google._upb._message.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/psutil._psutil_linux.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/psutil._psutil_posix.abi3.so'
<frozen zipimport>:259: UserWarning: google.protobuf.service module is deprecated. RPC implementations should provide code generator plugins which generate code specific to the RPC implementation. service.py will be removed in Jan 2025
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/tornado.speedups.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/wrapt._wrappers.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'


The Dropbox daemon is not installed!
Run "dropbox start -i" to install the daemon

Naturally, running dropbox start -i doesn't work because flatpaks are immutable:

alex@alex-desktop:/var/home/alex$ flatpak run com.dropbox.Client start -i
Starting Dropbox...dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/cryptography.hazmat.bindings._rust.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/apex._apex.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/google._upb._message.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/psutil._psutil_linux.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/psutil._psutil_posix.abi3.so'
<frozen zipimport>:259: UserWarning: google.protobuf.service module is deprecated. RPC implementations should provide code generator plugins which generate code specific to the RPC implementation. service.py will be removed in Jan 2025
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/tornado.speedups.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/wrapt._wrappers.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
/app/bin/dropbox:259: DeprecationWarning: Python 3.14 will, by default, filter extracted tar archives and reject files or modify their metadata. Use the filter argument to control this behavior.
  archive.extract(member, PARENT_DIR)
[Errno 30] Read-only file system: '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/VERSION'
/app/bin/dropbox:337: PyGTKDeprecationWarning: The keyword(s) "type, message_format" have been deprecated in favor of "message_type, text" respectively. See: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/PyGObject/InitializerDeprecations
  error = Gtk.MessageDialog(parent = None,
/app/bin/dropbox:337: PyGTKDeprecationWarning: The "flags" argument for dialog construction is deprecated. Please use initializer keywords: modal=True and/or destroy_with_parent=True. See: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/PyGObject/InitializerDeprecations
  error = Gtk.MessageDialog(parent = None,

[alexreinking]

I can confirm that downgrading restores functionality:

sudo flatpak update --commit=b629da18fb651c494e6b51ec5294d839e51b914443f49111a083ff74aebfae55 com.dropbox.Client
sudo flatpak mask com.dropbox.Client

[wjt]

dropbox: load fq extension '/app/extra/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-241.4.4795/apex._apex.abi3.so'

These messages come from the daemon. It is installed - what's breaking is that the launcher script can't find it. Interesting.

[wjt]

    Commit: f9d7dc2694d5b9c4fbf08def3e8ba24a8ba1b8b033e4aedf34939bf0dc05b19b
    Parent: b629da18fb651c494e6b51ec5294d839e51b914443f49111a083ff74aebfae55
   Subject: Merge pull request #394 from flathub/update-master-85fc656 (7499c03088d2)
      Date: 2026-02-04 11:25:21 +0000
   History: 

    Commit: b629da18fb651c494e6b51ec5294d839e51b914443f49111a083ff74aebfae55
   Subject: Merge pull request #393 from alexreinking/master (0dbd85ef04a8)
      Date: 2026-01-26 14:34:27 +0000

That working Flatpak commit corresponds to git commit 0dbd85e. Here is the diff between that and the current commit on master, 7499c03:

https://github.com/flathub/com.dropbox.Client/compare/0dbd85ef04a8..7499c03088d2433c06a064e367b578d169e127fe

[wjt]

That said: 7499c03 works on my machine™...

[wjt]

There are no interesting changes in the nautilus-dropbox update that is one half of the diff in the two Flatpak versions dropbox/nautilus-dropbox@7b9ff31...669f65e