Google gives Quickoffice the boot

Google will kill off Quickoffice before the end of July, in favour of its own Google Apps suite.

Google bought Quickoffice in 2012, and has been integrating its features into its own Google Drive productivity suite. At Google I/O last week, the company announced a host of new features for Google Docs, including the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents natively, without having to import or convert the files.

"With the integration of Quickoffice into the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps, the Quickoffice app will be unpublished from Google Play and the App Store in the coming weeks," the company said in a post on the Google Apps blog.

In September 2013, the company began giving Quickoffice away free, adding a sweetener of 10GB of Google Drive storage lasting until September 2015.

Although it's taken two years, it's not surprising Quickoffice is being discontinued.

At the time of the acquisition, Alan Warren, Google's engineering director, said the company would be "working on bringing [Quickoffice's] powerful technology to our Apps product suite", and would only be supporting Quickoffice until it was integrated with Google Apps.

While the productivity suite will no longer be available to download following its forthcoming withdrawal, existing users will still be able to use it, Google said, although no new features will be added.

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk