San Francisco — In a fresh move to lure the growing cloud-based users, just five months after unveiling its Google Drive cloud storage services, Google on Monday unveiled several useful features to its Google Drive app for iOS and Android platforms, adding editing and collaboration tools for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users that are already present in the Google Drive app for Android.
Google added editing and collaboration features for iOS devices, already available on the Android version of the application. With this update, some handy features in Google Drive will make it easier for iOS and Android users to revise documents on the go, view modifications made by others and view presentations more easily. And for the Android platform, Drive app added improved commenting system.
The bulk of this updates are geared toward iOS devices as Google continues to build up support for the top two leading mobile operating systems. In a blog post on the Google Enterprise Blog, Anil Sabharwal, senior product manager for the Google Drive Team, mentioned that the improvements come as more users are choosing to get more things done in the cloud.
More so, iPhone and iPad device users can now for the first time “edit Google documents directly in the Drive app, just as you can with the Android app,” wrote Sabharwal. “From your iPhone or iPad, you can create a new document, edit an existing one or format text. And just like on your computer, you will be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they are made.”
As for iOS users, other new improvements include:
Other iOS-centric updates are focused on Google presentations, which now includes speaker notes, full-screen mode and the ability to swipe between slides, according to Sabharwal. Users can also look for more functionality already available in the desktop version, such as creating and managing new folders, along with direct uploads from mobile devices, he added.
As for Android users, they get improvements such as:
Android users will also see all of the aforementioned presentation functionality, as well as the ability to add comments, reply to existing comments and view tables in your Google documents. “And you will have the same new abilities to view presentations and organize your stuff as your friends with iPhones do,” wrote Sabharwal.
In addition, other planned new features are also in the works for the future, he wrote, including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. Besides, the updated iOS app is available in Apple’s App Store and the latest version for Android smartphones and tablets is available in Google’s Play Store.
The Google Drive cloud service was launched April 24 after about six years of planning and talks about its intentions to introduce a cloud storage service. The file storage and synchronization service provides users with 5GB of free storage capacity, with additional capacity available for a monthly subscription fee that charges $2.49 per additional 25GB of cloud storage.
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