Web and Mobile Development Strategy Proposal - TDF Community Blog

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Executive Summary

This proposal suggests restarting LibreOffice web, mobile, and cloud development by structuring the project into a set of independent initiatives. Each initiative can be pursued separately from the others, and their deliverables will be useful improvements to LibreOffice even without the other components.

• Responsive user interface

• Web distribution based on desktop version using WebAssembly

• Mobile distributions based on desktop version

• Document server and integration

• Client-server collaborative editing

One of the greatest risks to large software projects is schedule slip due to dependencies between components. By structuring the project as independent initiatives with separate deliverables, rather than a single monolithic project, we can reduce that risk. This approach also calls for a high level of code sharing across the desktop, web, and mobile versions, which will reduce both our initial development and long-term code maintenance costs.

The result of this project will be a blended web, mobile, and cloud offering and development strategy, which will signal to the public that LibreOffice is on a clear trajectory toward achieving technical parity with the major commercial office suites. In lieu of invasive first-party cloud service integrations, we will aim to offer server components that are lightweight and inexpensive to host, and make it easy for users to work with multiple server providers.

Please note that this document is intended as a strategy proposal, not as a technical specification or project plan. Technical and planning commentary in this document should be considered speculative. Additional work is needed to prepare concrete implementation plans for each initiative, should we choose to proceed with this strategy.

Market Analysis

Consumers

Due to the nature of our project, we have relatively little visibility into the needs of our end users. We also have limited resources to conduct primary market research, in part out of consideration for user privacy. Most of our institutional understanding of end user needs comes from engaged community members who volunteer their time to advocate for their particular interests, which may not be representative of larger populations.

Rather than investigate the needs of end users directly, we can instead borrow from economics and examine the revealed preferences of consumers: if a great majority of people select one product over its alternatives, ceteris paribus, we may safely assume those people prefer that product. Thus, the features our major competitors use to distinguish themselves can serve as signposts for what users consider when choosing between cloud-enabled office suites.

Service Providers

One special case is the group of users who are invested in deploying and operating cloud-enabled office suites. This category ranges from institutional IT decision-makers, to on-premises cloud software vendors such as Nextcloud.

The Document Foundation has not been previously involved with developing or marketing a cloud-enabled office suite. As a result, we have few direct contacts we can use in order to gather requirements. However, we may be able to draw some conclusions about what this category of consumer wants based on public comments and prevailing economic and regulatory conditions.

For server operators, the world looks quite different today than it did when the LibreOffice project was founded. Application hosting costs have risen dramatically, driven by a complex interaction of increasing energy costs, server component supply chain disruptions, excess demand due to AI speculation, and vendor consolidation. We can no longer expect users to host applications that perform unnecessary computation inside the datacenter, where space, hardware, and energy are all at their most expensive – and are needed for other business activities.

In addition to more immediate financial concerns, software sustainability / “green coding” has continued to develop among policy, government procurement, and investor risk management (ESG) circles. For one concrete example, the 2024 French RGESN V2 (“Référentiel général d’écoconception de services numériques”) mandates software eco-design principles and resource efficiency for certain types of public procurement. Many other jurisdictions are developing similar regulations, including Germany and the UK.

In order for a LibreOffice cloud initiative to succeed, we must at minimum offer software that server operators can afford to host. While these macroeconomic conditions are still evolving, it seems clear enough that service providers will grow increasingly sensitive to operating costs, and will prefer applications that require less energy, bandwidth, and system memory in the short term. As there is currently no energy-efficient cloud office...