OneDrive joins Dropbox to move to native Mac M1 support

Microsoft has announced a public preview of OneDrive sync for ARM devices, signaling that there will eventually be a public version of its own version of OneDrive for the Mac M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max.

9to5Mac first spotted and reported this announcement after Microsoft’s Ankita Kirti posted the following on the OneDrive blog this morning:

We’re excited to announce that OneDrive sync for Windows on ARM and Apple chip is now available in public preview!

We know this is a highly anticipated and highly requested feature and are very excited to make it available for Early Access.

To enable preview, you’ll need to make sure you’ve joined the Insider Circle and turned on preview in OneDrive settings > About.

We’ll roll this feature out to Insiders in the next few days.

Native application support for the Apple architecture is actively moving forward in the macOS software ecosystem. Of course, there are a few major exceptions such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 and Autodesk Maya, but in general we’ve seen many popular apps go native since the M1 debuted last year.

But utilities like Dropbox or OneDrive have often proven to be notable deviations in this regard.

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Some niche apps that don’t have good support may never migrate to the new architecture, but users expect widely used apps like Dropbox and OneDrive to be a must for many workflows and jobs.

Most Apple Silicon Mac users who open Activity Monitor and sort processes by “Kind”find that they are still running Apple and Intel apps on their machines, but the gap is closing. Often outliers are things like background utilities and extensions. However, Intel’s versions of most applications work fine with Rosetta 2 – they’re just less performant than they would be natively.

Microsoft hasn’t said when OneDrive ARM support will go public, but insiders will at least get access soon.