SkyDrive for Android phones now available
A few weeks ago we announced our intention to release an official SkyDrive app for Android phones. Today we're excited to announce that the app is now available for download. We want to ensure that you're able to have your files accessible across …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has been rebuilding SkyDrive as a cross-platform service rather than a Windows accessory: an HTML5 web client arrived in 2011, native apps for iPhone and Windows Phone followed that December, and in April 2012 the company opened SkyDrive's APIs so third-party apps could pull the storage in. The stated design goal has been personal cloud storage 'for billions of people.'
The Android app closes the most conspicuous gap in that plan. With ComScore putting Android at 51% of U.S. smartphones as of May 2012, Microsoft's own ecosystem held only a minority slice of the devices its storage needed to reach — and the breadth of same-day pickup across eight outlets from PC Magazine to ZDNet suggests how closely the platform watchers were tracking it.
First-order effects
- Android users gain official first-party access to their SkyDrive files on the single largest U.S. smartphone platform, no longer needing web workarounds or third-party clients.
- Microsoft's cloud storage now runs natively on rival platforms — Android and iOS — putting it in direct competition with Dropbox and Google Drive on their home turf.
Second-order effects
- Google faces Microsoft's storage service inside its own mobile stronghold, while Dropbox loses the 'works everywhere' differentiation that justified its paid tiers against a free incumbent.
- Every major cloud-storage vendor is now pushed toward shipping on all three mobile platforms, making feature parity — camera upload, offline files — the competitive surface rather than platform availability.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, personal cloud storage consolidates around services judged by cross-platform reach rather than operating-system allegiance — reinforcing Microsoft's pivot from selling Windows-bound software to running services on any device, the logic behind both the API opening and the 'billions of people' framing.
The trend: Personal cloud storage is becoming a cross-platform land grab in which Microsoft extends SkyDrive beyond its own devices to compete with Dropbox and Google Drive wherever users actually are.