Wednesday 25 April 2012

Google Drive for Android is a beefier Google Docs app


Google's unified policy took effect on March 1 and covers not only the new Drive, but other Google properties. The relevant section of Google's terms of service starts off with a reassuring statement: "Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." But here's the sticky part:
"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."
This last bit conjures up visions of Google employees acting out your screenplay at their next all-hands meeting. Unlikely. And it's important to note that rival services, including Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud , all use similar language (though a little lighter on the legalese).
Dropbox, for example, cutely refers to your "information, files, and folders that you submit" collectively as "your stuff." It then says that "you retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it."


But as great as as the new Google Docs, er, Google Drive app is, it is still missing a few key features. For one, it's impossible to move files around within your drive from the app. You can't transfer files between collections (folders) or even create new collections. This means that all of your housekeeping will need to be done from a desktop.
Also, Google Drive doesn't let you share files with download links. This is something that Dropbox does exceptionally well. It would be nice to be able to create a download link for any file in my drive, and send it to friends who don't use Google Drive.
Finally, and this may be nitpicky, I wish the app would let you sort files by type. With so many different types supported, it wouldmake life a lot easier for power users who store massive numbers of files in the cloud.


Regardless of its shortcomings, I still highly recommend downloading the Google Drive app for Android. It nicely integrates all of the Docs functionality, plus it gives you the extra power to access and share other types of files.
Google Drive (download) is available now for free on Google Play. But before downloading, make sure you've enabled Drive on your Google account.

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