With Drive realigned, Google will now kill Quickoffice apps
Following Google's recent overhauls of Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, the company has decided to axe Quickoffice, its app for editing Office documents.
After Docs, Sheets and Slides became standalone apps with the capability to edit Office documents, Google doesn't really need Quickoffice anymore. So, in the next few weeks, it's going to yank the app from the App Store and Google Play.
"With the integration of Quickoffice into the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps, the Quickoffice app will be unpublished from Google Play and the App Store in the coming weeks," the company said in a recent blog post.
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"Existing users with the app can continue to use it, but no features will be added and new users will not be able to install the app," it added.
Google acquired Quickoffice in 2012 to help improve integration of Google Apps and Android, and launch an offensive against Microsoft's productivity suite cash cow. At the time, there was little sign that Microsoft intended to make a version of Office for the Google OS; today, the arrival of Office on Android is a matter of when, not if.
Quickoffice has undergone numerous shifts in Google's hands. Early last year, Google began giving Quickoffice away free to its Google Apps business customers, while also selling the standalone QuickOffice Pro app for $20. Later in the year, it made Quickoffice available for free to everyone but shackled it to Drive, in the same way as Docs, Sheets, and Slides now are. At the same time, it switched off support for the Quickoffice Pro.
In May, it somewhat confusingly shifted strategy again, spinning off Docs and Sheets from Drive. They became standalone productivity apps for iOS and Android, while a Slides app was also announced as under development.
At its annual I/O developer conference last week, Google launched the Slides app for iOS and Android, and brought the ability to edit Office documents to all its own equivalent apps — essentially bringing across the main features of Quickoffice.
The integration of Quickoffice came alongside Google's launch of Drive for Work, offering file encryption in transit and auditing API it hopes will appeal to the enterprise.