A little over a year after acquiring mobile office suite QuickOffice, Google is dropping the price of QuickOffice… and by dropping, I mean there’s no price at all anymore. QuickOffice is now available as a free download for Android and iOS.
QuickOffice lets you create, edit, and share text, presentation, and spreadsheet documents. It’s compatible with Microsoft Office files, which kind of makes it the missing link for folks that aren’t ready to give up Microsoft Office for Google Docs.
Ind addition to setting QuickOffice Free, Google has made a few updates tot he app including an option to create ZIP folders, view charts in Excel and PowerPoint files, and a unified app for smartphones and tablets.
Folks who sign into QuickOffice using a Google account by September 26th will also get an extra 10GB of storage added to their Google Drive account for 2 years (although it could take a few weeks for the extra storage to show up in your account).
Google’s removing older QuickOffice apps from the Play Store and App Store, but existing users can continue to use them if they’d like. Unfortunately the older iOS apps aren’t fully compatible with iOS 7 and cloud storage will stop working in the old apps at the end of March, 2014.
How well does this support physical keyboards? For example, keyboard shortcuts.
How does the free 10 GB work after 2 years? Will you automatically be charged for it every month? Do you just lose it (what happens to existing files)?
If it’s like the free storage Google offers Chromebook users, after 2 years you have the option of paying to keep your storage. They won’t delete any files — but if you want to modify or delete your files and you’re over the new size limit of your account, you’ll have to delete files until you have enough space (you can always download them for safe-keeping).
Of course, 2 years is a long time away in Google years. The company could decide to extend the promotion, or it might bump up the amount of free storage all users receive between now and then.
My question is: What is the actual price for this “Free” offering from Google?
Attempting to lock you into Google Drive and pull you away from reliance on Microsoft Office.
I was thinking more along the lines of Google browsing documents like they do email and bombarding the user with ads,
The same as with all closed-source freeware, your user’s freedoms:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html