I see my Drobo5N has several new apps that have installed themselves with no interaction (or permission) from me. Most of these apps I don’t see myself using.
Not sure if this is a good thing or not. They must be taking up space, will they interfere with my Drobo activities? What else can Drobo do to these machines and with our data without our knowledge?
/s/ A Concerned Citizen.
What are the apps?
I see new apps CrashPlan, Firefly, Modoboa, and MySQL available for installation but not actually installed.
My mistake, they are NOT installed. Drobo still pushed these links down to my 5N without so much as a “please” or “thank you”. They weren’t there before.
I think there is a misunderstanding about what the DroboApps section of the Dashboard actually contains. The app list that you see there contains both apps that are actually installed on your Drobo (from the Dashboard or manually, a.k.a., unsupported apps), and official apps that are available from the Drobo app repository.
In other words, all apps that just show up as “installable” on your Drobo have absolutely no impact on your Drobo at all. In fact, they are just populated from a file retrieved from DRI’s FTP server.
In short - it’s listing apps they’re offering at the top. They’re as installed as the listings in Apple’s App Store are. 
EDIT: Holy hell, CrashPlan is official now? Does this mean I can get some support with my ungodly filesets? 
Well, precisely, it’s kinda-sorta-half-supported, more like. See the official announcement here: http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=141634