A week of real document work from an Android phone: which suites survived and where each one gave up
The question keeps coming up as "which app fully replaces an office suite on Android", and the answers are usually a list of names with no test attached. So I did a week of actual work from a phone with a folding keyboard: editing documents other people sent me, filling in spreadsheets with real formulas, and sending things back that had to open correctly on someone else's machine.
Sorted by where each one stopped rather than by what it claims.
The big vendor suites
Editing is genuinely capable now, and fidelity is the best of any option: a document you send back opens the way you left it, which is the entire job for most people. Where they stop: several of the things you expect are behind a subscription tied to an account, and on a phone a fair amount of functionality assumes you are signed in. If the reason you are asking this question is that you do not want an account, this category answers the wrong question well.
The open-source suites
Editing works, the formats are handled honestly, no account. Where they stop: complex formatting on documents authored elsewhere. Simple text and tables came back fine. A document with tracked changes, nested numbering and a template applied did not survive the round trip intact, and I only found out because the recipient told me.
The lightweight document editors
Fast, pleasant, no sign-in. Where they stop: spreadsheets. Basic arithmetic is fine; anything with lookups, conditional formatting or a pivot is either unsupported or silently dropped on save. Silently is the important word.
The browser
Frequently the best answer and the one nobody suggests. The web versions of the major suites work on a phone with a keyboard, fidelity is by definition correct, and nothing is installed. Where it stops: offline, and on a small screen without a keyboard it is unusable.
What the week actually taught me
Viewing is solved everywhere. Editing your own documents is solved nearly everywhere. The thing that is not solved is round-tripping someone else's file - and that is what people mean by "replace" and never say.
So the useful question is not which suite is best. It is whether the file has to come back looking identical to a person who did not choose your tools. If yes, fidelity is the only criterion and the answer is narrow. If no, almost anything on this list works and you should pick on whether it wants an account.
@fidelity_is_all · 3w ago
The round-trip framing is the correct one and I would add the detail that makes it worse: you cannot tell when it has gone wrong.
A document that loses a tracked change or flattens a numbering scheme does not report an error. It opens, it looks broadly like a document, and the damage is only visible to the person who knows what it was supposed to be. I have sent one of those to a client and did not find out for a fortnight.
The practical mitigation for anyone stuck doing this: send a PDF wherever the file does not genuinely need to be edited further. That converts a fidelity problem into a rendering problem, which every one of these handles correctly. About two-thirds of the documents I used to worry about did not actually need to remain editable, and I had never asked.
That single habit removed most of the risk without changing tools at all.
Reply
Report