This inferred charge of hypocrisy would make sense if the Files app competes with Dropbox. I can see why that would be assumed. But while there’s certainly some overlap, Files isn’t a replacement for Dropbox, or vice versa. Perhaps controversially, I would argue that they do not compete.
Files is a built-in app that ostensibly fills the role of Windows Explorer on macOS Finder, to the extent that the concept of a file browser makes any sense on iOS.
The purpose of the Dropbox app is to access the Dropbox service and to buy their cloud storage. Apple’s Files app does not compete with this—except insofar as it shows you the cloud storage that you are currently paying for (potentially including Dropbox) or local storage that you have already paid for.
Let’s be real here, if anyone typed dropbox into an App Store search because they wanted the dropbox app, literally nobody is going to be confused. Literally nobody is going to be misled by an app that isn’t called Dropbox. We all understand this sensation when doing Google searches—even when a competitor’s ad is bigger and more prominent, we can be functionally blind to it when exactly the result we wanted is right there underneath.
(By they way, let’s also remember that the word dropbox is a generic term. It is a word that has been used for file sharing before the Dropbox(tm) service existed. Companies shouldn’t get to own generic words just because they were first to commercialise them. Microsoft wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, legally or morally, if Oracle or postgres wanted to market the offering as an “SQL server”.)
The entire concept of how the files app works and integrates indirectly with everything on iOS is effectively a stand-in replacement--maybe a better one for some use cases, for sure, but that seems besides the point--to Dropbox. This is because iOS ostensibly doesn't really want to have a file system, and so the concept of storing things into the Files app--which is the interface for and is largely backed by iCloud Drive, which is 100% a competitor to Dropbox--is about as weirdly indirect as storing something into Dropbox. I would thereby think that, in fact, a number of people looking for Dropbox's functionality--to share files between apps on their phone and store them in the cloud--might get tempted to use Files instead to accomplish that exact same core use case.
Files takes an extension (plugin) approach to files, and is decidedly non-Posix since it was focused on supporting remote/slow file sources first.
iCloud, WebDAV and CIFS (as well as On Your <device>) are examples of support that Apple ships first party, while third party extensions include Dropbox and OneDrive as well as more exotic things like emulator file systems (iSH) and SSHFS.
Before Files came out, every app that wanted to integrate with DropBox had to ship a dropbox SDK which included people logging into dropbox through each app, individual developer API tokens, etc.
Now the user just installs Dropbox and it works.
The challenge for Dropbox has and continues to be being a product and not a feature (with a nod to Steve jobs).
Files is a built-in app that ostensibly fills the role of Windows Explorer on macOS Finder, to the extent that the concept of a file browser makes any sense on iOS.
The purpose of the Dropbox app is to access the Dropbox service and to buy their cloud storage. Apple’s Files app does not compete with this—except insofar as it shows you the cloud storage that you are currently paying for (potentially including Dropbox) or local storage that you have already paid for.
Let’s be real here, if anyone typed dropbox into an App Store search because they wanted the dropbox app, literally nobody is going to be confused. Literally nobody is going to be misled by an app that isn’t called Dropbox. We all understand this sensation when doing Google searches—even when a competitor’s ad is bigger and more prominent, we can be functionally blind to it when exactly the result we wanted is right there underneath.
(By they way, let’s also remember that the word dropbox is a generic term. It is a word that has been used for file sharing before the Dropbox(tm) service existed. Companies shouldn’t get to own generic words just because they were first to commercialise them. Microsoft wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, legally or morally, if Oracle or postgres wanted to market the offering as an “SQL server”.)