Why does part scanning take so long?

There are 65535 possible ports. The only way to know which ones are open is to send requests and parse the answer. Depending on the network, the response can arrive quickly or not. If it takes too long for a response, the scanner may specify a time-out duration at which point the port is simply deemed closed.

“Fast” port-scanners either have a ridiculously short time-out, only scan common ports, or both. We take a pragmatic approach, which means we scan common ports first and display those results right away. Then we have a thorough sweep across the entire port range specified (use configurable). This takes time if the targeted device has a network interface configuration which does not respond immediately to portscan probes.

We are therefore halting support for DropBox for these reasons: We spend a not-insignificant amount of time troubleshooting DropBox issues for our customers.

Previously, integrating DropBox was as simple as including their library and adding some “glue” code to our project. Apple’s recent move to Apple Silicon on Mac OS X, however, means the old DropBox package no longer works. Recompiling the DropBox frameworks for our project now requires drastic changes to our project hierarchy as DropBox no longer provides a simple plug-and-play solution but rather asks developers to download their source-code and compile it separately using 3rd party code management tools that must also be integrated into the main project. This is invasive, time-consuming and error-prone.

Apple has now enabled iCloud support for apps that are not distributed via the App Store. This enables robust sync support for all of our products on every supported platform without additional 3rd parties.

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