Earlier this year, the Dropbox Android app ran by the 500 million installs milestone on Google Play. The problem with that metric is that it tracks the number of times the app has been downloaded from the Play Store, which includes updates to pre-installed versions. That makes this a very unspecific marker of how many people actually use Dropbox on Android.

We still don't know the answer to that question, but today Dropbox is happy to announce the number of people using the service overall. Over 500 million people have signed up since the file hosting company started syncing the contents of desktop folders in 2008.

Dropbox is based in the US, but fewer than half a billion people live in the country. Dropbox has found success expanding to other parts of the world. The company gives the people of Brazil, Germany, India, and the UK a shout out for topping the list of new users among the last 100 million to join. Overall, 75% of the company's audience comes from outside of the US.

Competition among cloud storage providers grows increasingly fierce, with Apple, Google, and Microsoft all offering file hosting options to go along with their operating systems. Some services aren't able to keep the servers running, such as Copy, which is shutting down in a couple of months. Despite not shipping with an operating system, Dropbox continues to find room to grow.

Source: Dropbox