Another productivity suite comes to Android, this time with a more open source bent and with a distinctive legacy. The open source LibreOffice suite is finally on our favorite mobile platform, but it has two important caveats. First is that it’s still in beta, which probably isn’t much of an issue for some who are used to beta testing such early releases. The showstopper, however, is that LibreOffice on Android, for now, is simply a document viewer, limiting it’s overall usefulness to a certain subset.
LibreOffice has a rather colorful history. It takes its roots from OpenOffice.org, one of the most prominent office suites that became a key rival to Microsoft Office when it came to freely available and open source software. At that time, OpenOffice was still under the care of Sun Microsystems. But when Sun was acquired by Oracle, many were worried about the latter’s anti-open source stance, leading them to fork OpenOffice into the LibreOffice that we know today.
Despite being popular on desktops, LibreOffice still had to make headway into Android, where the space is growing more crowded, especially now that Microsoft is playing there as well. That said, those who still prefer an open source solution now have one in their hands and pockets. The somewhat disappointing part is that LibreOffice on Android is only a viewer, so users are limited to opening documents and files, though that in itself might already be useful in presentations or meetings. Even as a viewer, the app is already quite capable, supporting both open and proprietary document formats and many editions of Microsoft Office files.
The app also carries a heavy disclaimer that it is still in development and shouldn’t be considered stable yet and its developers don’t recommend using it for very important tasks. The app also does have some other limitations that developer Collabora is hoping to address in future releases, including clickable URL links and browsing external SD storage.
Download: LibreOffice from Google Play Store
SOURCE Collabora
