This era is such a pointless attack against the smallest niche of users. I honestly don’t get it. How much are a few techie hobbyists costing Google/Samsung’s gargantuan bottom lines? They are stepping over dollars to chase after pennies.

Just let people who want to modify their phones. It’s already prohibitively hard that no one who doesn’t have the know-how is installing their own apps outside the stores.

Not part of the team. Like I mentioned, the AI features are not a positive for me either, but they are in line with what other apps are doing.

I last ran serious testing a year ago. I ended up going with OnlyOffice. Despite some drawbacks, it was an easier switch that offered less friction and better file compatibility coming from MS.

As per my previous comment, it should offer reasonable use of screen space, visual hierarchy, and well-reasoned organization. Moving bad menus to a different arrangement on the screen doesn’t magically make them into good menus.

As a first step, it was a good move, although it was a decade late when it came out. They still haven’t done a major redesign another decade on.

True, but it is a purely aesthetic rearrangement of the menus. It doesn’t make it any more straightforward to navigate. Plus it doesn’t really function correctly on Windows (and it takes up just as much screen space).

It was a good step when they rolled it out about a decade ago, but they still haven’t done the work to make it better organized or show appropriate hierarchy.

Creating and replicating genes is a very cool technology. But it is a far cry from going into every cell and replacing the DNA without causing any damage.

I’ve had a relatively good experience with OnlyOffice, although it has some issues.

Personally I don’t see interoperability as an anti-open issue, but I can appreciate the stance. I think I have to investigate to understand how the Microsoft format diverges from the open standard for office XML files, or in what way the format remains proprietary. I had been under the impression that OnlyOffice follows the open standard.

OnlyOffice does ape Microsoft Office in a lot of ways but I see that as a positive. Users are far more likely in my opinion to switch to something that looks and feels familiar.

LibreOffice is hard to use. The menus and shortcuts are not well organized and the entire suite feels like a relic from the early 2000s. If they invested in a modern UI with less friction for users who are looking for MS alternatives, they wouldn’t be facing competition from projects like OnlyOffice. If they invested in feature parity for mobile users, they wouldn’t be losing potential users to those who offer it.

They have an incredibly powerful backend with far more capability than the more junior OnlyOffice. Yet they fail to recognize why that just doesn’t matter to the majority of users. Most users just want to quickly author and edit files, share them with other users, and get on with the next task. LibreOffice has become overly fixated on niche features and optimizations that are very cool from a technical standpoint but are totally out of touch.

By the way, LibreOffice also supports OOXML, so… do with that what you want.

Linking to my recent weather app review for Overmorrow, a fantastic weather app.

The days of Google encouraging third-party stores and users to sideload apps regardless of origin are long gone. We are fast approaching Play becoming as near a simile to Apple’s App Store as we could ever see.

I think it’s a stretch to say that Google ever encouraged side loading. But if their plan is to eliminate it all together, that’s a pretty scary thing. I don’t think it’ll go over well in Europe either.