Personal cloud storage is all the rage these days. Dropbox continues to be one of the most buzzed-about startups and its enterprise-focused counterpart Box is making moves toward the consumer market as well. For music files, Google, Amazon and Apple all offer cloud-based storage lockers and iOS allows syncing of other types of content via iCloud.
iPhone owners not satisfied with the available options now have a new one in Microsoft’s SkyDrive, which launched its first iOS app today. The four-year-old service has been available to Windows users on the desktop and Windows Phone platform for some time. Today, it starts to branch out onto other platforms.
The SkyDrive app is going to be most practical for Windows users, which is not an insignificant potential user base. By bringing it to iOS, Microsoft acknowledges that its own mobile operating system doesn’t have quite the adoption rate that its desktop OS does.
Lots of Windows users are carrying around iPhones, so it only makes sense for Microsoft to let them access their cloud-stored files from the device. Otherwise, most people will instinctively go for a solution like Dropbox. With its 25 GB of free space, SkyDrive is an attractive alternative to Dropbox, who only offers only two. Box’s free account comes with five gigabytes of free storage.
This is just the latest iOS app from Microsoft, who released an application for Bing as well OneNote, which may foreshadow the eventual launch of Microsoft Office for iOS.
