Eventual forced replacement?
Does this mean that for those of us that have QuickOffice now, a future update to KitKat will remove it and replace it with Docs, Sheets and Slides at some point?
Quickoffice, Google's Microsoft Office–compatible productivity app for Android and iOS, is no more – sort of. In a brief note published to the Google Apps blog last week, the company said it soon plans to "unpublish" Quickoffice from Google Play and the iTunes App Store. "Existing users with the app can continue to use it, …
"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"
I'd assume that installed apps stay installed after updates…? But let's say that in three-four years, it will simply stop working properly with Android Popsicle.
I don't think Quickoffice was ever seen as competition ... to Google.
It was seen as competition to Microsoft Office, that is why Google bought it as it had pretty good Office conversion and they wanted to use that.
I'm not really sure who, apart from Microsoft would be 'harmed' here. Quickoffice developers were happy, users were happy (a once paid for product became free), Google were, I guess, happy.
It is quite different to buying up a competitor to create or maintain a monopoly. The only one that is dominant in the 'office' space is Microsoft.It is good in any field to have serious competitors to dominant players - that's why the Apple IOS, Android, Kindle, WIndowsPhone etc competition is good for consumers. Also why having strong non-Microsoft Office suites would be a very good thing for consumers.
Google bought Quickoffice because it had broken the proprietary MS/Office code that kept me from updating my stuff (*docx,*.xlsx,*pptx) on my Google Drive. Adding the ability to edit my stuff on my drive breaks the MS/Office monopoly on my stuff.
About a year ago Google said 90% of users only want/need Apps that can edit MS proprietary formats; they don't need the integrated fru-fru sold as enterprise solutions.
The thing I liked about quickoffice (aside from the fact it could open pdfs as well as office docs) is that it was a small program with just enough functions to make it useful. How large are the replacements? Apple and MS's three individual apps take ~700MB each, that's quite a large chunk of a 16GB ipad for all three.