Google recently released a dedicated iPad app for its cloud-based file syncing and storage solution, Google Drive (formerly Google Docs), and there is very little reason to download it. Why? Because there's a better way to experience Google Drive on an iPad: through a browser. It doesn't matter if your browser of choice is Safari, Opera, Dolphin, Mercury, or Google's own Chrome. They all provide a much richer, hands-on experience with Google Drive compared with the piddly Google Drive app.

The App's the Problem, Not the Service
Don't get me wrong. I adore Google Drive, and make no bones about it being a PCMag Editors' Choice product. The free cloud storage and file-syncing service boasts extraordinary features that you can't get in even the best competitors—namely, SugarSync and Dropbox, two other Editors' Choices—such as real-time collaborative editing. But the iPad app is an assault on everything that makes Google Drive special. Google Drive isn't just a file-syncing solution. If it were, the Google Drive iPad app would only be a step or so behind the apps for SugarSync and Dropbox (because it crashed repeatedly in testing and doesn't have sharing options, which the others do). But it's not just a file-syncing service. Google Drive is also an entirely Web-based and free alternative to Microsoft Office.

The first time I encountered Google Docs (long before I became a software analyst), it truly liberated me from the holy trinity of business-standard software: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Suddenly, I had choice. And the alternative was free. And it worked! I get a little doe-eyed just recounting that moment.

In the Google Drive iPad, everything I've come to know and love about Google Drive has been nixed. You can't create documents. You can't edit anything, which means collaborative editing isn't supported either. Your documents are visible, but as read-only files. A search bar mostly worked for me, but inconsistently. Multiple attempts to search the same words at first turned up results, and later came up empty. At least there is a search bar, I suppose. My biggest gripe about SugarSync's iPad app is the lack of a search tool altogether. Back to what's missing in Google Drive's iPad app: Share buttons are nowhere to be found. Can you select multiple documents at once to perform one action on a batch? Of course you can't. Plus, the app crashed repeatedly during testing.

It really leaves me wondering how the app can be so bad—again, not when compared with other apps of its kind, but in light of everything Google Drive does above and beyond other file-syncing services?

It crushes me to remember (as anyone who has used Google Drive/Docs on an iPad via a browser already knows) that it doesn't have to be this way. Google Drive works extraordinarily well on an iPad browser. It doesn't replicate the full computer browser experience 100 percent… until you select "use desktop version," in which case you get the real deal. Using the full desktop version becomes quirky here and there, primarily because some menu options don't process touch input, making it impossible to choose an option from a drop-down selection.

It's not as though the iPad apps for SugarSync and Dropbox do miraculous tricks that Google Drive for iPad can't. With SugarSync and Dropbox, you can't edit files either; but then again, you can't edit files in their Web apps, but you can in Google Drive. That's the whole point. 

What You Should Use
For most purposes, it is preferable to use the mobile browser version. You'll hit a few snags, but they are the kinds of limitations you'd expect in a mobile version of a pretty complex service. For example, collaborative editing (meaning, when you and another person edit the same document simultaneously so that you can see one another's changes as they happen) isn't supported in the mobile browser. Editing spreadsheets resembles filling out a form, because cells look a little different when you select them to make a change. You also have to hit a refresh button to see all your changes reflected on the document, whereas the full Google Drive automatically saves and refreshes seamlessly.

The Google Drive iPad app only gives you one thing you can't get through the Web browser, and that's offline-viewing capabilities for documents you mark for offline access. That is the one and only reason someone might want to download the Google Drive app.

Go With Browsers
Mobile browsers breathe life into Google Drive, whereas the dedicated Google Drive iPad app suffocates the otherwise remarkable service. Use a browser—any one of your choice—to access your Google Drive files. Maybe you'll want the Google Drive iPad app if and only if you need offline, read-only access to specific files, and even then you'll need to set up the offline access before you go out of Wi-Fi, 3G/4G range.   

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