Advertisement

Box releases OneCloud for Android

Share

Box OneCloud is now available for Android phones and tablets with a gallery of 50 compatible apps. Among the partners is iAnnotate, which lets you annotate, manage, search and share your documents, and is to launch its Android app Monday as well.

Box’s Android app comes three months after the enterprise cloud service provider released its iPhone app with 30 partners, which has expanded to about 50 now.

“This time around we found it was easier to get partners,” Box vice president of product Chris Yeh told The Times in an interview. Apparently, they found that only 11 of the 50 partners overlapped between iOS and Android.

Advertisement

Mobile is a fast-exploding part of the industry’s focus. For Box, about 40% of its clients are mobile users in some form, and 35% use Box exclusively on mobile devices, Yeh said.

A handful of the 50 available apps inside the OneCloud gallery appears when you open a document. Those are the apps Box has determined will work best with that file type. For now, they are hand curated.
While Box is currently doing the work of deciding which apps work best, in the future, OneCloud could have more of a user-curated experience with the most popular partner apps rising to the top.

A couple of things Box talks about are the security that’s baked into the app and the ease of use of the developers’ kit.

On the security side, Box has built in a layer that encrypts the file to send it to the third-party app, then decrypts to edit the file and then encrypts it again to send -- important to business to keep secure.

“We think [developers] can do a OneCloud integration within a day,” Box’s Yeh estimated.

In addition to iAnnotate, Dolphin browser, Breezy and FetchNotes are also available within the Box gallery.

RELATED

Advertisement

Who owns your stuff in the cloud?

Out of the Box with CEO Aaron Levie

Box goes global with London headquartersFollow Michelle Maltais on Google+, Facebook or Twitter

Advertisement