Microsoft Word for Android has been installed more than 1B times

I find all of the negativity related to this very strange. Microsoft Word on Android is incredible (and the other MS Office apps for that matter). The ability to not only view, but even <i>edit</i> documents on my phone has come in handy many times. Google Docs is good for what it is, but it is not 100% compatible, and round tripping documents that contain complex formatting is risky.<p>Overall Microsoft&#x27;s Android apps are of very high quality. I&#x27;m pretty certain that these 1 billion installs are not just bundling deals. The vast majority of businesses and governments rely upon Microsoft Office, so is it really that surprising that employees of these organizations would install these apps on their mobile devices?

It came pre-installed on my Samsung phone. I&#x27;m sure I count towards that number, even though I uninstalled or disabled it as soon as I got the phone.

Very tangentially related:<p>Back in the Windows Mobile &#x2F; PocketPC days (2003), I&#x27;d just written my first mobile app, an HTML editor [0], using the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 and C#. Windows Mobile&#x27;s API was a subset of the Win32 API, and the Compact Framework was a _very_ limited subset of the full .NET 1.0 Framework.<p>.NET CF exposed a TextBox control, but no rich text edit control. There was a &quot;Pocket Word&quot; app that shipped with the OS, and it _did_ have rich editing capabilities (bold&#x2F;italic&#x2F;underline&#x2F;highlight, bullets, fonts). Sadly, that wasn&#x27;t exposed as a reusable control anywhere. This was annoying, because A) it would have been neat to use that in my own app, and B) lots of folks kept asking in the newsgroups if a rich edit control existed for the PocketPC.<p>I ran across a mention somewhere of a couple Win32 messages that supposedly allowed interaction with the rich edit control that Pocket Word was built on, and spent a few weeks trying to reverse engineer the interactions. I finally was able to figure out what most of the bytes in the control structure were used for, and wrote a long newsgroup post documenting my findings [1].<p>I never did get around to making use of those capabilities in an actual app, but it was a fun exercise.<p>Looking at the formatting capabilities in Word for Android, it&#x27;s so much more powerful. Amazing to see how far mobile app capabilities have come since then.<p>(I also experimented for a while with trying to port the Scintilla code editor widget to Windows Mobile. And then there was the time I tried to use a .NET 2D scenegraph lib in a PocketPC app, but the .NET CF didn&#x27;t support enough System.Drawing APIs, so I wound up hacking together an almost-working solution using Mono&#x27;s System.Drawing implementation backed by a fork of Cairo from Mozilla Firefox for Windows Mobile. Ah, fun times :) )<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isquaredsoftware.com&#x2F;pockethtml.php?page=Description" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isquaredsoftware.com&#x2F;pockethtml.php?page=Descript...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!msg&#x2F;microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework&#x2F;MOk776gh5Fs&#x2F;9VUDZhFJTokJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!msg&#x2F;microsoft.public.dotne...</a>

uninstall and reinstall is the new &#x27;have you turned it off and on again&#x27;

Despite many of the negative comments here I find Word on Android pretty awesome. I wonder if the comments are more &quot;historical&quot; anti Microsoft and less objectively focused on the product.<p>I also think OneNote is great on my phone, as is Excel!

I installed it and never used it as I have moved over to Google docs.