Apple, Google, or Microsoft? Your platform will dictate your office app

Earlier this week, I had a story and a related spreadsheet nearly ready for my editor, but I needed to verify a few details first. Because I was nowhere near a computer that day, I couldn’t fire up Microsoft Word and Excel to update the story and spreadsheet. However, I had an iPhone and an iPad, so I moved the files to my Dropbox account, where I could update the files on the road and send it to my editor.

I didn’t have Wi-Fi access when the missing notes came in, so I couldn’t use my iPad without spending $20 to enable a cellular connection. My iPhone has several office apps on it, so I went with that. Because the files were in Dropbox, I launched Quickoffice Pro, as it directly connects to Dropbox and other cloud services — unlike Apple’s iWork suite, which requires copying files from cloud services to the apps via Open In, then copying them back out, whch creates version-control hassles. Unfortunately, Dropbox was no longer there.

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It turns out that Dropbox support in Quickoffice Pro for the iPhone (and Android smartphones) went away in April. Dropbox had changed its APIs in 2012 and gave developers a year to adapt. Although Google updated Quickoffice Pro for the iPad (and Android tablets) to the new Dropbox APIs, it didn’t do so for the iPhone version. In fact, the iPhone version has not been updated since May 2012 and is apparently an abandoned product. (Google told me it had nothing to say on the matter. It’s also kept its silence on the Quickoffice support forums about the issue, despite dozens of pleas from customers.)

My workaround was to access Apple’s iWorks apps on my iPhone, despite the clunkiness of using iOS’s Open In facility for file sharing across apps rather than a direct connection to Dropbox. Of course, if I had stored the files in my Box or Google Drive account rather than Dropbox, Quickoffice would still have been able to access them. But while setting up the files, I wasn’t aware that Quickoffice Pro on the iPhone no longer supported Dropbox, and once you’re on the go, your files are where your files are.

[UPDATED 9/20/13] And it gets worse. Yesterday, Google released a new version of Quickoffice (for iPhones and iPads, as well as Android) that is free if you have a Google account. But it supports only Google Drive, no longer other cloud services like Box and Dropbox. Worse, you can no longer edit files stored in Google Drive but instead use the woefully incapable Google Drive app to do so. These changes make Quickoffice much less useful, removing one of its major advantages over Apple’s iWork suite. And if you think that holding on to the prior versions will let you have your Quickoffice and cloud services too, sorry: As of March 2014, those older Quicloffice versions will lose their support for cloud services other than Google Drive.

These incidents bring to mind the changing dynamics of the mobile apps world. For the first few years, the two major office apps — Quickoffice and Documents to Go — were available on iOS and Android, creating a sense that a company could pick a standard office suite regardless of the devices its users bought. Apple, as is often the case, was the exception: Its iWork suite is iOS-only on mobile, just as it is OS X-only on the desktop. That fact only made Quickoffice (the significantly better of the two cross-platform suites) more attractive.

But Google bought Quickoffice in June 2012, which is when Quickoffice Pro for iPhone and Android smartphones appears to have been abandoned. Like Apple, Google is not too interested in cross-platform compatibility. Yes, apps that feed Google’s search business are available for practically every platform, but the same is not true for apps that serve other business interests at Google.

When it bought Quickoffice, Google killed the poorly executed Quickoffice Connect product that integrated Quickoffice better with OS X and Windows, for example. At the same time, it delivered earlier this year an offline mode for Quickoffice on its Chrome OS laptops, essentially bolstering the poor editing tools in its Google Drive service. The new Quickoffice app clearly cements it to Google’s services, making it too a separate ecosystem at least on the document storage side of things.

We seem to be moving to a world where you’ll realistically have a choice of just iWork on iOS and OS X, Quickoffice tied to Google account holders, and Office on Windows and (in a limited version) OS X. (Yes, Microsoft has Office for Android smartphones, the iPhone, and Windows Phone, but it’s horrible on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS and can’t be used seriously.) If this scenario plays out, Google Drive will be the barely functional cross-platform “solution” for non-Google platforms, just as the Web versions of Office 365 and iWork will be for the non-Microsoft and non-Apple platforms, respectively. And cloud document access becomes tied to your platform of choice, with the awkward Open In method being the only way in iOS to use your cloud storage service of choice.

If that’s how it goes, we’ll lose an important asset: independent apps that work across platforms. Maybe Google will refresh its Quickoffice app for the iPhone after iOS 7 launches, and these fears will not come to pass. But the larger trend doesn’t give me much hope that the future will be increased platform isolation, dividing the world into increasingly chasmed application camps.

This article, “Apple, Google, or Microsoft? Your platform will dictate your office app,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.