Collabora Office for Android & iOS Credits

About Collabora Office for Android & iOS

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

FOSDEM 2012 presentation by Michael Meeks
Screenshot of prototype presented at FOSDEM 2012

 

2013  – LibreOffice based CloudOn app for iPads

  • Many of SUSE’s LibreOffice Core developers are spun out to form Collabora Productivity
  • VC funded CloudOn makes a key investment to work with Collabora on a native iOS app for iPads
  • Matus Kukan (Collabora) builds the foundations to link the entirety of LibreOffice into a single shared library image
  • Jan Holešovský (Collabora) and Tor Lillqvist (Collabora) implement tiled rendering inside Writer

2014 – LibreOffice Viewer (Beta)

  • Funding from Smoose and Collabora makes the first development of a ‘real’ Android viewer possible
  • Andrzej Hunt improved and extend tiled rendering to Calc and Impress during Google Summer of Code 2014
  • Kohei Yoshida (Collabora) reviews, re-works and merges the Calc tiled-rendering code to master.
  • Tomaž Vajngerl re-target the Fennec tiled-rendering code from Mozilla’s android browser to target the LibreOffice core
Writer screenshot of 2014 LibreOffice Viewer (Beta)
Impress screenshot of 2014 LibreOffice Viewer (Beta)

2015 – LibreOffice Android Editor prototype

  • Collabora wins a TDF tender to “develop the base framework for an Android version of LibreOffice with basic editing capabilities”
  • Igalia won the part of the tender to implement an ownCloud integration.
  • Collabora released an LibreOffice for Android: prototype editor preview that implements tiled editing in the LibreOffice core, as well as the input handling work in Java based on the Fennec code.
  • Collabora creates Online – a new codebase for collaborative web editing
2015 Writer editor preview
2015 Calc editor preview

2016 – Hoping for a LibreOffice Android Community

  • LibreOffice for Android it is hoped, will be completed by community volunteers; the basic editing is kept as an experimental / advanced feature
  • Christian Lohmaier does important work in keeping the viewer compiling and fighting bit-rot for TDF

2017 – Summer of Code Initiatives

  • Collabora helps out by mentoring several students on top of the Fennec / Java framework
  • Gautam Prajapati, mentored by Collabora Developers Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna, worked on improving the LibreOffice Viewer for Android during the Google Summer of Code 2017
  • Ximeng Zu, also mentored Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna from Collabora, worked on solving bugs in the LibreOffice Android Viewer during GSoC 2017

2018 – Stagnant Development

  • Muammer Mert Tümer, mentored by Collabora Developers Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna, worked on the Google Summer of Code 2018
  • 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

Spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS
Writer spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS

2020 – Collabora Office available for Android

  • 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)
  • Collabora Office for Android is released with full editing capabilities, a focus on privacy and free of charge
File picking on start-up of Android app
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!