Free MS Office iPad Alternative Gone from the App Store

A company called CloudOn recently released a productivity suite for iPad users setting the Apple blogosphere on fire with its nifty office features, but it appears that the software has now been removed from the App Store.

At first it wasn’t clear who pulled the app and, most importantly, why. Initial reactions included suggestions that Microsoft had sent a takedown notice to Apple.

CloudOn lets you use Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint on your iPad to create or edit documents, and Microsoft is also working to bring its popular Office apps to the iOS platform.

However, by checking with the CloudOn web site, we learned that the company has voluntarily pulled the software:

“Thanks for your support of CloudOn! We're currently sold out. We look forward to the feedback we will receive as we continue to support the many users that have registered in this first phase. If you missed out on our first release, please sign up here,” reads a note on the CloudOn site.

Sold out? How do you sell out a piece of software? Well, as it turns out, this is just the short version of the story. The bigger picture lies in a lengthy explanatory post, here.

The explanatory piece says, “Unfortunately, we did not anticipate the thousands of people that would gravitate to the service in a matter of hours. Although we had planned to support a large number of users, the interest generated was beyond our expectations, and we have had a few teething issues with our platform (some of which we have already partially resolved)."

"We have also made additional resources available to ensure that we can continue to support our current users,” the developers of CloudOn say.

“Also, due to the overwhelming demand we’ve taken down our app from the iPad AppStore and will return when we are confident we can support more users. While we don’t know exactly when this will be, if you’re interested in pre–registering for this release, please visit: http://site.cloudon.com/soldoutemailform/capture.html.”