Google announced its Drive cloud storage service just over two years ago, if you can believe it. Drive competes with Dropbox, OneDrive, and other cloud services, but at the time it also consumed Google Docs, the company's Web-based productivity suite. To view and edit any documents you created in the Web version of Drive on your phone or tablet, you've always needed to install and use the Google Drive app, but Google has now altered course a bit: the company just released new, standalone Google Docs and Google Sheets productivity apps for Android and iOS, breaking document and spreadsheet editing out from the Drive app for the first time on mobile devices. The apps are compatible with iPhones and iPads running iOS 7 and Android phones and tablets running version 4.0 or newer. Slides, an app for creating and editing presentations, is "coming soon."

The Docs and Sheets apps that have been released mostly duplicate functionality previously available in the Google Drive app. Certain features have been moved around, but as of this writing there are no extra formatting features in the standalone Docs and Sheets apps that weren't already available in Drive, though there are small improvements. You can now edit files that you've saved locally (these were previously read-only), and you can't buy Drive storage as an in-app purchase on iOS devices from either Docs or Sheets, though it's still an option in the Drive app. The Slides app, at least, will give us something we can't already do—the Drive app in iOS and Android can view presentations created in the Web version of Drive, but it can't edit them or create new presentations itself.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Google's press release makes it clear that the Drive app is sticking around but that its focus will shift to managing and viewing files rather than editing them. "You’ll still be able to use the Drive app to view and organize all of your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and more," Google said. The Docs and Sheets apps on both iOS and Android include buttons that will kick you to the Drive app if you have it installed.

Both apps store and retrieve their files in the Google Drive cloud platform, but neither can view or open files that they weren't designed to open. However, Google Drive will soon lose its editing capabilities—a Google representative told us that the application will receive an update that prompts users to download the Docs and Sheets apps when they want to edit their files. The new Google Drive app will presumably work more like the Dropbox app, able to view many different types of files but reliant on external applications for editing.

It's hard not to see the separate apps as a response of sorts to Microsoft's recent Office for iPad release, which, like these applications, exists as a suite of separate apps instead of one monolithic "Office for iPad" app. When the promised Office apps for Android tablets arrive, they'll likely follow the same course. There's an argument to be made for keeping all of that functionality in one place, but separating everything out makes those services more visible to users (going to Google Docs to make a document makes more sense than going to Google Drive) and allows people to download the apps they want while ignoring the ones they don't. Separating the apps also gives Google the opportunity to add new features to one app without having to update everything at once.

Google Docs and Google Sheets can be found in both the App Store (Docs, Sheets) and in Google Play (Docs, Sheets).