Credit: VLADGRIN
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.
This incident brings 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.
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