Thank you for your interest in Collabora Office for Android & iOS. These mobile apps are based on the core engine of LibreOffice and developped by Collabora Productivity with the help of other partners. In combination with a new front-end based on Collabora Online, it reads and saves documents similarly to LibreOffice on the desktop. Collabora engineers have been developing the Android support since 2012. Collabora Office has been the first free and open source office app available for iOS. For more details on the evolution of the software, we strongly recommend you to read Michael Meeks’ article about the evolution of Collabora Office for phones. On this page we would like to credit many of those who contributed to making this open source office suite for phones and tablets possible by giving a chronological overview over this huge effort that extended over several years.
2012 – Android Prototype
SUSE as a foundational supporter of LibreOffice started to create cross-compilation for Windows, that we could also use to target the Android platform
TDF continues calling for more voluntary development support. The (unlisted) video below is a beautifully done example, that – unfortunately – this fails to attract significant support for the app.
Mert working for ULAKBIM / Pardus fixes a number of issues with the Fennec code
Dec 2018 – 2019 – Collabora Office re-writes to use Online for iOS + Beta version for Android
Adfinis and Collabora completely rewrite the old Fennec approach in favour of a native web-view with a local Online instance for offline functionality on iPads. This discards a large amount of legacy code, and shares it with Collabora Online
The Mobile phone UX is completely re-written, with a new expandable bottom palette of simple, frequently used tools created by Szymon Klos
Native platform storage provider interface added on Android integrating with ownCloud, Nextcloud, Seafile, OneDrive or DropBox (this obsoleted Igalia’s TDF funded native Java integration from 2015 mentioned above, and allowed accessing all system content integrations)
Copy/paste available through convenient gestures on Android
Easy to use pop up menus for Calc on Android
More contributions from the Collabora Team
Throughout the initial first prototypes, the LibreOffice Android Viewer to the fully functional Collabora Office for Android & iOS apps, many other not yet mentioned Collaborans have been contributing a lot of important work into this project. Here is an alphabetical overview of some of their key contributions. Again, this information is taken from Michael Meeks’ Collabora Office for Phones article.
Andras Timar took care of various l10n peculiarities
Aron Budea has spent a lot of time testing, reporting bugs and fixing regressions
Ashod Nakashian was heads-down improving the focusing and showing / hiding the keyboard, fixed crashes, exposed sidebar (reused for the Szymon’s work) & lots of related fixing
Dennis Francis has done many fixes all over the place in the UI – crashes, panning, context menus additions, zooming
Florin Ciornei has ported most of the shell functionality from the old app (as mentioned above), and created a separate notice and licence activity
Gülşah Köse has implemented the initial WebView app and improved the files association
Grzegorz Araminowicz has fixed zoom and reworked the hyperlink dialog
Henry Castro has implemented the image or shape preview when dragging or rotating, read-only mode handling, context menus improvements, scrolling, toolbars, and many more.
Marco Cecchetti has reworked the formula input bar in Calc work via dialog tunneling and list of formulas
Mert Tumer has added features even to the old, fennec-based app, and later decreased the size of the APK, improved the usability by adding progress bars to some events that take a lot of time.
Muhammet Kara added text box insertion, page setup menu, various chart-related work, and line formatting.
Pedro Pinto Silva has done huge amount of work to make the app beautiful.
Pranam Lashkari has implemented the inertia and smooth scrolling, row/columns improvements in Calc, sheet renaming, and various smaller things
Szymon Kłos has repurposed the sidebar as a single-finger-controllable menu representation; more on that below
Tamás Zolnai has prototyped a new unit testing framework via Cypress
Tomaž Vajngerl has co-mentored the Android GSoC, improved language setting, implemented export / save as functionality, hugely improved the clipboard handling
Yunusemre Şentürk: Fixed build errors & implemented the CI
Contribution by affiliation
So how does the project to date until May 2020 look ? this is based on code changes to Online:
Almost all of the original Smoose / TDF funded code doesn’t survive in Online, but it built a bridge to a bright future, and naturally all of the LibreOffice Core code is still shared with the core community. You can find an infographic and credits for all the other awesome community members who help to develop the LibreOffice core too. In the core core the contribution is more evenly spread:
Licence, Source Code, and Download
Collabora Office for Android & iOS is open source and released under the Mozilla Public License v2 and others. The source code is available here. You can download Collabora Online for Android & iOS via the app stores. The latest .apk of Collabora Office for Android can also be found here!
