Microsoft Word for Android has been installed more than 1B times | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Word for Android has been installed more than 1B times

theverge.com

66 pointsflywithdolp22 comments

I find all of the negativity related to this very strange. Microsoft Word on Android is incredible (and the other MS Office apps for that matter). The ability to not only view, but even edit documents on my phone has come in handy many times. Google Docs is good for what it is, but it is not 100% compatible, and round tripping documents that contain complex formatting is risky.

Overall Microsoft's Android apps are of very high quality. I'm pretty certain that these 1 billion installs are not just bundling deals. The vast majority of businesses and governments rely upon Microsoft Office, so is it really that surprising that employees of these organizations would install these apps on their mobile devices?

There is still a lot of Microsoft hate, or people in denial that Microsoft makes some amazing products. People like to think the world has moved on its something. Don't even mention Azure market share, some people hear will go full blown truther.

The app may be great. I have no opinion on that. But the number (1 billion installed!) is rather meaningless, if many manufacturers are installing it by default. Active monthly users would be a more meaningful statistic (and would allow comparison with total android user base [1]).

All that said, I find it entertaining that the ability to do word processing on mobile is seen as "incredible". I would think word processing is a simple task that demonstrates a device to be a real general purpose computer - I've done word processing on a computer since I was a child.

[1] about 2.5 billion devices active monthly. https://twitter.com/Android/status/1125822326183014401

I'm not saying that just doing word processing on my phone is incredible. Microsoft Word is one of the most powerful word processors and I just find it incredible how many features from the traditional desktop version are supported on a mobile device.

after having tried to reverse engineer some proprietary document format i’m becoming really sensitive to companies walling their market by doing complex and poorly documented file format. I feel like reaching a certain market share there should be a regulation forcing companies to at least document the format.

How are .docx document doing those days ? Is it possible to create a docx reader that would display word document correctly? ( at least the basic features, excluding complex things involving spreadsheet embedding for example)

It came pre-installed on my Samsung phone. I'm sure I count towards that number, even though I uninstalled or disabled it as soon as I got the phone.

Same on my SOs Nokia.

She threw it out right away.

Reminds me of the Chrome rush when it came "bundled" with all kinds of freeware and suddenly overtook Firefox.

Seriously, after seeing all the spyware "analytics" they tie in to Windows 10, I wouldn't trust anything from Microsoft to be on my phone. Google is also pretty invasive, but at least they're not malicious.

I'm surprised you consider Microsoft's data collection practices to be worse than Google's. Would you be willing to elaborate on that at all?

Not OP. Microsoft gave away windows 10 for free and then added tracking to everything you do. I believe they even started showing ads on the start menu. It’s free no longer but the practices continue. You’d probably have to upgrade to business or enterprise to remove it.

>Not OP. Microsoft gave away windows 10 for free

Correction: Windows 10 upgrade for free. If it's a new system, you still need to buy a license, and OEMs still have to pay.

Google gives Chrome, Android, Gmail, Search,.. away for free so that they can track and show you ads.

Is it better in Android?

You consider Google less invasive? That is an interesting spin. Although, why do you think Microsoft is malicious? Google is showing you ads to manipulate your behavior for their own profit. I find that business model more problematic.

Exactly. It comes preinstalled on many mobiles and tablets, like Samsung’s. This number is worthless.

It came pre-installed on my Samsung tablet but not on any of our Samsung phones (GS6s, GS7s, GS9+). That may be carrier- or country-specific.

Very tangentially related:

Back in the Windows Mobile / PocketPC days (2003), I'd just written my first mobile app, an HTML editor [0], using the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 and C#. Windows Mobile's API was a subset of the Win32 API, and the Compact Framework was a _very_ limited subset of the full .NET 1.0 Framework.

.NET CF exposed a TextBox control, but no rich text edit control. There was a "Pocket Word" app that shipped with the OS, and it _did_ have rich editing capabilities (bold/italic/underline/highlight, bullets, fonts). Sadly, that wasn't exposed as a reusable control anywhere. This was annoying, because A) it would have been neat to use that in my own app, and B) lots of folks kept asking in the newsgroups if a rich edit control existed for the PocketPC.

I ran across a mention somewhere of a couple Win32 messages that supposedly allowed interaction with the rich edit control that Pocket Word was built on, and spent a few weeks trying to reverse engineer the interactions. I finally was able to figure out what most of the bytes in the control structure were used for, and wrote a long newsgroup post documenting my findings [1].

I never did get around to making use of those capabilities in an actual app, but it was a fun exercise.

Looking at the formatting capabilities in Word for Android, it's so much more powerful. Amazing to see how far mobile app capabilities have come since then.

(I also experimented for a while with trying to port the Scintilla code editor widget to Windows Mobile. And then there was the time I tried to use a .NET 2D scenegraph lib in a PocketPC app, but the .NET CF didn't support enough System.Drawing APIs, so I wound up hacking together an almost-working solution using Mono's System.Drawing implementation backed by a fork of Cairo from Mozilla Firefox for Windows Mobile. Ah, fun times :) )

[0] http://www.isquaredsoftware.com/pockethtml.php?page=Descript...

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/microsoft.public.dotne...

> Looking at the formatting capabilities in Word for Android, it's so much more powerful. Amazing to see how far mobile app capabilities have come since then.

I'm in the business of making a powerful Google Docs alternative, Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com). Our mobile versions were (are still) using native TextBox APIs to build the mobile word processor.

But interestingly, even with all the recent improvements, the native APIs to model complex formattings like background-color, tables and selections across multiple text-views are pretty tricky.

On the plus side, mobile OS's these days allow us to draw directly over a canvas which means we can get to those complex features by rewriting the app to render directly over a canvas. So yeah, we have come a long way indeed.

Also hey, you've helped me out with understanding some Redux stuff from time to time. Is there anything you haven't done? ;)

Thank you for all the effort you put in for the open source community.

Hah, there's _so_ much I've never touched at all. And really, these last few years that I've been focusing on Redux, I haven't had time to go off and play around with other things.

> Thank you for all the effort you put in for the open source community.

You're welcome! Glad to know I've been able to help out.

uninstall and reinstall is the new 'have you turned it off and on again'

Despite many of the negative comments here I find Word on Android pretty awesome. I wonder if the comments are more "historical" anti Microsoft and less objectively focused on the product.

I also think OneNote is great on my phone, as is Excel!

I installed it and never used it as I have moved over to Google docs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com