Dropbox, one of today’s leaders in cloud-based file storage, syncing and backup, last week announced an update to its iOS app to provide easier PDF viewing capabilities, push notifications for changes to shared folders, and enhanced file-sorting features. While not the most path-breaking, these features represent another milestone in Dropbox’s continued journey from a simple cloud-based syncing and storage site to an intelligent, application-aware, content access platform.

Dropbox is just a very logical ‘killer app’ on top of the cloud; consumers have a core need to store and sync data, and Dropbox’s simple interface with a freemium offering has latched on to this need to create a viral product. Having said that, Dropbox is part of an intensely competitive industry segment – the other key players in consumer storage and syncing are Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive and Apple iCloud – and it is a credit to Dropbox that it has been the continued perception leader in this space. Dropbox currently has more than 200 million users and more than a billion files stored per day. Probably the one thing that has helped the company get to such scale is its emphasis on simplicity. Over time, Dropbox has added features making it simpler to do such things as uploading photographs and videos, sharing files on Facebook, and enabling developers to create add-ons. Last week’s news continues this journey towards a better user experience.

While key competitors all have cross-selling interests (Google Apps, Microsoft Office etc.), Dropbox represents a pure-play, OS agnostic, data-centric solution. At scale, with additional home-grown and third party apps (entrepreneurs anyone?), Dropbox can legitimately become your music or video player, your photo-sharing site, your enterprise collaboration suite, your business intelligence engine and so on. So, will Dropbox become the behemoth of the next decade, or will it be taken out sometime soon? For the consumer’s sake, hope the former comes true…