It’s been more than a year since Google acquired Quickoffice, a mobile app for editing Microsoft Office files on tablets. Over the last few months, it has slowly expanded the tool’s availability by making free for Google Apps for Business customers. Everybody else still had to pay for the apps. Today, however, it is changing this policy and is making Quickoffice for iOS and Android available for free to anybody with a Google account.
As Google bemoans in its announcement, while converting documents to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides is easy, “sometimes the people you work with haven’t gone Google yet.” Using Quickoffice to work on Office files is a reasonable compromise, the company seems to imply, especially given that the documents are saved on Google Drive.
Current Quickoffice for Google Apps for Business users can update their app to the new version and get a number of new features in the process. The app can now, for example, create .ZIP folders and allows you to view charts in Excel and PowerPoint. It also, Google stressed, works across devices, “so you don’t have to worry about installing separate versions anymore when you go from using your phone to editing on your tablet.”
To sweeten the deal, Google is giving anybody who signs in to the new Quickoffice app for Android or iOS before September 26 10GB of extra Google Drive storage for the next two years.
Earlier this year, Google also said it was bringing Quickoffice to the browser, using its Native Client technology. So far, however, we haven’t heard much about the web version. With the mobile app freely available to all now, however, chances are the launch of the web app isn’t that far off either.