Friday, November 07, 2014

Google Drive for iOS brings TouchID, file access in any app

There are plenty of cloud storage options out there, but none quite as good as Google Drive. Google's home-grown cloud storage option is cross platform, available to anyone for free, syncs seamlessly, and is easily accessible. A big part of Google’s cloud storage footprint is on iOS, where both iPad and iPhone owners use it in place of — or addition to — iCloud. Today, Google ash upgraded Drive to suit a growing number of iOS 8 users, as well as the ever-increasing iPhone 6 user-base.

The update to Drive on iOS optimizes the service for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screens, and also lets you use TouchID to open your app. If you want to use TouchID instead of a passcode, you’ll first have to have  a passcode set-up for Drive. After you have that set-up via settings, you can take advantage of TouchID. You’ll also be able to save videos locally from Drive. To save a video from Drive to your Camera Roll, just select “Save Video” when you have the video open.

If you don’t want to view a file in Drive, you can now open files saved to Google’s cloud in other apps. Make changes, and those are synced once you close the file and it re-saves to Drive. That makes Drive one heck of a cloud storage photo editing repository, and mimics the Drive update Google pushed for Chrome earlier. Except for the video saving option, everything else is iOS 8 only. As the cloud storage wars get serious, this is a pretty major move for mobile, and on the largest mobile platform around.

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