LibreOffice Viewer is a lightweight version of the free office suite for Android devices. It was available in the Play Store in the past, but was removed in 2020 due to lack of maintenance. Now, after the release of version 7.6.3, the app will return to the Google Storeas reported by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice is one of the great open source developments and the best productivity and collaboration suite you can use compared to commercial development. Completely free and with more than enough features for the vast majority of users, it is one of the biggest alternatives to Microsoft Office, which dominates the office segment.

If the desktop edition is compatible with a wide range of hardware architectures and versions for the major platforms (Windows, Linux and macOS), excellent, The same cannot be said for its mobile equivalent.. LibreOffice released a browser for Android devices in 2015, which was finally pulled “lack of maintenance”. It was simply not a development worthy of the kit.

LibreOffice browser

The document Foundation, the nonprofit group that develops and maintains the kit, announced the return of LibreOffice Viewer to the Google Play Store. Although the app was not completely removed and was available on alternative sites such as F-Droid, there is no doubt that its inclusion on the official platform will offer it much more visibility and ease of installation and use.

And hopefully it will now live up to what the development deserves. The developers say that after the app was removed, «more than two hundred changes were made to improve the application, increase its stability and usability, support current versions of Android and achieve better integration with the system».

LibreOffice Viewer is a native Android app based on the same technology used in the desktop version for Windows, MacOS and Linux, so it should display documents in the same way. The application supports open document format files, including ODT, ODS, ODP and ODG. It can also open modern Microsoft Office files (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) as well as older versions of Microsoft (DOC, SLS and PPT).

And we say “open” because this solution doesn’t have the editing capabilities of Microsoft or Google mobile apps. The foundation explains that the application contains experimental editing function which can be enabled in the application settings but are not considered ready for use in productive tasks.

Everything will go… You can download LibreOffice from the Play Store or from F-Droid.