The popular LibreOffice suite after a three-year hiatus has returned to the Google Play Store for Android devices.
LibreOffice is a popular open source office suite, alternative to the paid Microsoft Office, and until recently only ran on Windows, Macintosh and Linux. The LibreOffice suite was until 2020 also available for devices Google Android, but its presence in the Store catslowdue to lack of maintenance.
The team behind LibreOffice has brought back its upgrades software and from the beginning of 2023 offered to F-Droid, a free and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Play. Now, it is also available on Google Play.
So LibreOffice returned to the Google Play Store and is called LibreOffice Viewer. In both repositories LibreOffice Viewer focuses on readability and accessibility rather than text editing.
LibreOffice Viewer uses the same engine as LibreOffice for Windows, Mac and Linux. This combined with a new interface based on Firefox for Android, reads documents similar to the desktop version of LibreOffice. Since it uses the same engine as the desktop version, it supports the main LibreOffice and Microsoft Office document formats.
While processing is limited, LibreOffice Viewer includes "a first preview of editing functionality". The developers warn that it is "considered an experimental feature" and that it is "not stable for critical tasks" at this point.
The team notes that they are working on adding editing capabilities to LibreOffice Viewer and that users will be able to use this functionality at some point, without warning.
The low 3,9 rating it has on the Google Play Store is due to older reviews and refers to older versions. Current user testing reports that LibreOffice was able to display local documents just fine, but failed to display any cloud-based documents from connected cloud accounts, e.g. Google Drive or OneDrive.
Most importantly, an open source and free program has once again come to the fore to remind us that it's not all about monetary gain. But it will take some time for a full LibreOffice to appear on Android.
Until then, Android and iOS users can opt for it equally free for individuals Collabora Office, which is based on LibreOffice.
