LibreOffice is coming for browsers and smartphones

The Document Foundation (TDF) is strategically reshaping LibreOffice. The free office suite is to be further developed in the direction of browsers, smartphones and collaborative work. To this end, the foundation has created a team for mobile, cloud and peer-to-peer development. A browser version with Qt 6 and WebAssembly (WASM) will be used as a technical basis, among other things.

For the first time, TDF also explicitly mentions Android and iOS versions as development targets, which means that suitable smartphone apps are coming.

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At the same time, the foundation emphasizes that LibreOffice will remain primarily a desktop application. Regular desktop releases will continue to be published twice a year. The Engineering Steering Committee and community projects such as Google Summer of Code or Outreachy will also continue unchanged. All of this is outlined in a Document Foundation strategy document.

Until now, LibreOffice has been mainly a classic desktop software. Mobile use has played a secondary role for the institution itself. Officially, there is currently essentially an Android viewer with limited editing functions. On smartphones, many users choose Collabora Office, an office suite maintained by Collabora and based on LibreOffice with Android, iOS and online versions.

With the new strategy, there is already a working WebAssembly prototype. According to the TDF, LibreOffice will run “powerfully and natively directly inside the user’s browser” without placing a significant burden on the hosting servers. With WASM, developers compile native applications into a browser binary format that runs locally in the browser. Similar approaches are now used by many complex web applications, such as browser IDEs, CAD tools, or image editing software.

What distinguishes the planned browser version from classic cloud office suites like Google Docs or Microsoft 365, which run a larger portion of their processing on the server, is that the TDF outlines an architecture where as much of the computing work as possible will happen locally in the browser. This is likely to be of particular interest for self-hosted scenarios, by governments where data protection, low server load, and digital sovereignty play a greater role.

At the same time, the foundation wants to accelerate app development. For 2026, the strategy document mentions work on GUI code and test builds for Android and iOS emulators. iOS is explicitly mentioned for the first time. Jonathan Clark is taking over the management of the new division, with Dan Williams supporting him on iOS-specific issues, among other things.

In addition, TDF announces the first practical tests for collaborative document editing. Initially, a classic client-server architecture with direct TCP/IP connections will be used. In the long term, the foundation is also planning peer-to-peer concepts for document collaboration. In this approach, clients will synchronize their changes directly with each other instead of sending them via central cloud servers.

Technically, this is more demanding, but could offer advantages in terms of data protection, offline capability, and infrastructure costs.

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Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.