Box Goes iOS 8, Adds Support For App Extensions

Happy iOS 8 day, everyone. If you were hoping for any other sort of news, surrender. This is all you get today.

Box, the enterprise-facing cloud file storage and management company, today relaunched its iOS app with support for both iOS 8, and a key feature of that new operating system: App Extensions.

App Extensions allow applications to swap and share data between themselves, meaning that you can now use your Box data that is stored in of the app itself, inside of other applications. So, you will be able to select a file in Box, and, provided that your favorite editing software supports App Extensions, open it in the editor.

Box is working to weaves its service into other applications as broadly as it can. The company recently kicked its integration with Office 365 into beta, for example. Consider this another step along that path.

Box is betting that people who use its service want to use their pooled bits with other services that they already use, making its iOS 8 choice simple: The new operating system brought new ‘hooks’ between apps, so why not use them?

It will be interesting to see whether the large productivity companies follow suit in adopting the new technology. Given that the two most popular productivity companies — Google and Microsoft, I think it is fair to say — are not Apple, how quickly they start to accept Box data, and, for that matter, Dropbox data and Egnyte data and so forth, will be an interesting metric.