In what shouldn’t be a terribly surprising move, Google quietly announced last week that it would discontinue the QuickOffice document editing and viewing suite in an update to its Google Apps blog in the next few weeks.
What this means is that the dedicated QuickOffice Android app will be delisted from Google Play and Apple’s App Store for new downloads in the future and further development will be halted, but will still be available for those with a preinstalled version or those that have previously installed the app. In its place, Google will instead split the suite up and has integrated the key editing features from QuickOffice into the recently updated Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps for Android, iOS and Google’s Chrome browser/OS while adding the functionality into Google Docs itself for the web version as well.
This also means that QuickOffice as a brand and application will cease to exist in the coming weeks after nearly a decade on the market across various smartphone operating systems, beginning life as one of the first widely adopted mobile document editing suites when it was first launched for Symbian in 2003 before being expanded to other smartphone and feature phone platforms such as PalmOS/webOS and Windows Phone in later years, regularly being lauded for being one of the most complete viewing/editing suites on the market and being used over other alternatives, including many native options.
Google bought QuickOffice 2 years ago in order to shore up Android’s document editing abilities and quickly released a new Android version while simultaneously killing off versions for competing operating systems and quietly continuing development before announcing the discontinuation last week. With the move away from the self-contained app into a split suite, it will please some while surely annoying others, which means that other competitors will quickly fill the vacuum left by the removal of the app.
