Quickoffice Closing Down, Replaced By Google Drive

The latest updates to Google Drive's document editing features might have been a welcome announcement, but for Quickoffice, it was practically the writing on the wall. Now Google is formally putting a timer on the mobile office suite's life, giving users of the app a few weeks notice before it finally takes down the app from Google Play Store.

Although Google had its own online office suite before then, it bought Quickoffice in 2012 in order to, somewhat ironically, improve its productivity offering on Android as well as in iOS. Google made no qualms about the fact that it will be rolling Quickoffice features into Google Drive, back then still called Google Docs. That process has finally reached completion and there is very little reason for Quickoffice to retain a presence on Play Store.

The past few weeks, Google has been busy updating Google Drive's document functionality, culminating in a major announcement that coincided with I/O 2014 last week. First it separated the Docs and Sheets part of Google Drive into their own apps, both on Android and on iOS. The last missing piece fell into place last week when Slides was also given its own app spot, at least on Android initially.

However, the nail in the coffin was actually the new level of MS Offfice interoperability that Google announced last week. Previously, Google Drive could open and save to Microsoft's formats, but there was some deal of conversion between file formats involved, which could lead into potential lose of styling, if not data. Quickoffice, however, worked seamlessly with those same formats and, as of last week, Google's office suite finally gained such functionality as well.

As such, Google will be unpublishing Quickoffice from Google Play Store, but existing users need not fret. Those who have the app already installed will still be able to use it, but as far as new features and fixes go, Google considers it dead. New users, however, will no longer be able to install the app, though it wouldn't be hard to imagine some third party sources (which are not all reliable or trustworthy) will make the APK available. Google hasn't mentioned anything about the iTunes version of the app, but we can expect it to follow suit in the near future.

SOURCE: Google

VIA: Android Community