14 DAY TRIAL // Good news for Android users, as LibreOffice, the free Office suite has just been released on Android platform. The application has been developed by Collabora and Igalia, backed by Smoose, with contributions from Google Summer of Code students, together with The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community.
Many consider LibreOffice, one of the best free office suites on the desktop, is now available on Android as a native application for viewing ODF documents.
In addition, with the LibreOffice Viewer users will also be able to run basic editing capabilities, such as modifying words in existing paragraphs and changing font styles such as bold and italics.
According to developers, the editing function is still an experimental feature which has to be enabled separately in the settings. Keep in mind that this is not yet stable enough for mission critical tasks, so don't rate LibreOffice based on this feature alone.
Also, if you plan on using this feature pretty often, you might want to offer your feedback to developers using the bug tracker and attaching files that have triggered any issue that you might encounter.
The application will continue to be improved
The good news is developers promised to enhance it to a fully fledged editing solution in the future, which will happen with the help of the community.
The Android version of LibreOffice Viewer uses the same engine as LibreOffice for Windows, OS X and Linux. This, combined with a new front-end based on Firefox for Android, reads documents similarly to LibreOffice on the desktop.
LibreOffice supports several file formats like ODF (Open Document Format), Microsoft Office 2007/2010/2013, as well as Microsoft Office 97/2000/XP/2003.
You can now download LibreOffice for Android for free via Google Play Store. The application should be fully compatible with all devices powered by Android 4.0 and up.