Microsoft Announces SkyDrive for Android App, Reminds Us About Recent Changes

Microsoft published a blog post today that summarized changes made to SkyDrive, and also announced an official SkyDrive for Android app.  Read on for details.

Microsoft published a blog post today updating us on SkyDrive.  Outlook.com now has 10 million users, and SkyDrive.Com has now been launched.  In addition, an Android SkyDrive app is on the way.  Here are the main points of the blog post:

Over the past months, we’ve shared our approach to building versatile personal cloud storage that can scale to a billion people. Today, we’re excited to announce the next step towards that vision, and how this brings the SkyDrive desktop apps out of preview:

• SkyDrive.com – New, modern design for desktop and tablet browsers with instant search, contextual toolbar, thumbnail multi-select, drag-and-drop organization, and HTML5 sorting
• SkyDrive for Windows desktop & OS X - Faster uploads for people around the world and tons of bug and performance improvements under the hood
• SkyDrive for Android - A new app that lets you access, upload and share from Android phones
• SkyDrive for developers – Apps built using our SkyDrive API can now store or access any type of file in a person’s SkyDrive, plus there’s a new, easy-to-use file picker API for websites (similar to our file picker for Windows 8 apps)

With these updates and continued improvements to our back-end infrastructure, we’re excited to leave preview and unlock new possibilities for a billion customers with the upcoming releases of Windows 8, the new Office, and tons of devices and apps that connect to SkyDrive.

SkyDrive for developers

It’s been almost a year since we first announced the revamped developer platform for working with SkyDrive which made it easier to integrate SkyDrive into mobile and web apps. Since then we’ve gotten consistent feedback on two key places where we could improve our developer story.

1. No more file restrictions and full control over photo upload resolution
   There are no longer any restrictions on the types of files that your application uploads to SkyDrive. Additionally, you can now upload images in their full resolution.
2. Open and Save pickers
   Our API now includes a SkyDrive file picker for opening and saving files to SkyDrive by adding a few lines of JavaScript to any website.

With these changes we’ve addressed a few of the top items of feedback from our developer community and can’t wait to see the interesting innovations that our customers will get to enjoy, now that this functionality is available. We’ll cover these changes in more detail in a follow-up blog post.

Check out the full blog post here, and if you are using an Android device, watch out for the announcement that the SkyDrive app is available.  I use the iPad app for SkyDrive pretty heavily, and would love this on an Android tablet.

SkyDrive Blog Post