Documents today celebrates its tenth anniversary - along with the milestone of 90 million downloads worldwide - having grown from file reader to a superapp, designed to make your digital life easier.
Documents captures all your files whether they’re email attachments, scans, photos, videos or music and intuitively stores them in folders within the app, which you can tailor to your liking.
Each year we’ve expanded it more to help you get more done, from quick sharing and smart suggestions for improved workflows, to VPN and PDF editing.
History of Documents Documents’ preceding product, ReaddleDocs - a web service for Safari - was created in 2007 by our founders who were really impressed by the new iPhone, but frustrated they couldn’t read books or articles on it.
They started coding relentlessly and within a year had pioneered this early file reader, which to their delight, caught the attention of Apple. In 2008, ReaddleDocs was one of the first products ever to be featured on the new App Store.
Then in 2013 Documents the superapp was officially born. A lot of significant events took place over the last decade or so, the most groundbreaking include:
Walt Mossberg from WSJ listed Documents as one of his ‘favorite apps that makes the iPhone worth the price.’
We launched Documents for iPad without iPad, based on leaks and rumors on how this device might have looked.
Our Tera app, the first browser with tabs became a part of Documents - the feature that so many of you love - with over 5 million activations a day.
Documents was born. We built a new product team and the super app for file action was built along with the positioning we stand for.
We launched quick sharing capabilities such as Wi-Fi Transfer and AirDrop.
Smart Suggestions went live, stitching together various features and workflows. Greatly empowering our users, which helps to get more out of Documents and your device.
Documents X went live, which included a VPN for online privacy and unlimited Internet access, enhanced extensions and action menu, and so much more.
New horizons
Today, the work still continues. In December last year we introduced an enhanced Actions Menu and revamped Extensions enabling faster and easier workflows when working with third party file types.
Now you can open a PDF, image or music file in Documents directly from any app using the new extension from the system Share Sheet. The new Actions menu displays contextual actions based on the file type you’ve tapped on.
And we’ve not finished yet - more magical updates are coming soon.
Eugene Plokhoj, Product Manager at Documents says: “We’re delighted to celebrate ten years of Documents and very grateful for our 90 million downloads. Every feature we design, every update is about helping our users speed up their workflows and find a fast, flawless way of getting on top of their paperwork.
“Documents is like that colleague or classmate you can always rely on. People call it a Swiss Army knife, where you have a lot of helpful tools packed into a convenient and compact user interface. We’re really excited about the journey that lies ahead.”
For enquiries or to interview Readdle/ Documents founder Igor Zhadanov pls contact pr@readdle.com