LibreOffice is a desktop application, and we will continue making it. But we have constant requests for web and mobile versions, so here is our updated plan. These are minutes from the TDF Team and Board of Directors meetings on web and mobile strategy for LibreOffice:
Who was present
Team: Michael Weghorn, Jonathan Clark, Sophie Gautier, Neil Roberts, Mike Saunders, Guilhem Moulin, Heiko Tietze, Ilmari Lauhakangas, Dan Williams, Xisco Fauli, Christian Lohmaier, Vissarion Fysikopoulos, Juan José Gonzalez, Olivier Hallot, Florian Effenberger, Hossein Nourikah
Board: Eliane Domingos, Mike Saunders, Paolo Vecchi, Simon Phipps, Sophie Gautier
Summary
The meetings, which took place April 20, April 22 and May 19, focused on discussing LibreOffice and TDF strategies for the evolving development landscape and the future of LibreOffice across all platforms – desktop, mobile, and cloud. Team roles were reviewed, and new assignments were proposed.
Status of the current foundation team activities
Since 2020, the development of LibreOffice within the foundation focused almost uniquely on the desktop version of LibreOffice (and to a lesser extent, the Android viewer app) and that part will continue unchanged. Therefore the foundation will continue to deliver two major LibreOffice releases per year.
Engineering Steering Committee (ESC)
The current ESC members and activities remain unchanged, and weekly meetings continue with reports on activities, releases, topics and project management. The meeting, as always, is open to the development community.
Community support
No changes in vision for community support. Regional events and special projects remains as they are, and require proper and timely project submission and available budget. Google Summer of Code and Outreachy will continue as before. The LibreOffice Conference 2026 is planned and will take place in Pordenone, northern Italy.
Marketing and communications
Marketing and communications will adapt to the current situation of the foundation and LibreOffice . More communication of team activities and product development is needed, as well as improving the use of social networks for mass communication. Unification of the several different blogs is under consideration.
Challenges ahead
The foundation is challenged to address the following areas:
- Develop an online and mobile version of the suite. The challenge is to select the technology that fulfill both end-user and server side management
- Innovate in collaboration such as peer-to-peer document editing
- Continue to produce two releases per year of the desktop and Android viewer versions
- Improve the user interface and usability of LibreOffice
- Keep the quality and security of the office suite
- Develop new features and improve current features
- Cherry-pick relevant features and improvements from other software producers
- Full support of the Open Document Format (ODF)
- Produce adequate documentation for development processes and the current and new products
- Be an active participant of the major open source communities and government initiatives for FOSS and nations’ sovereignty
- Preserve donation inflow and pursue corporate or government donations through development projects
New assignments of the team
It was suggested that the team be distributed in two parts, with proper interaction between the groups. Additional headcounts, as well as external contracts are considered to fulfil the mission. New community developers will be assigned to tasks upon demand.
Of critical importance, the suite security and CVE’s management were assigned to Christian Lohmaier (Release engineer) and Xisco Fauli (Quality Control). Coverity and OSS-Fuzz services are assigned to Xisco Fauli. These new missions require additional manpower, and provisions for hiring an additional QA specialist is needed.
The team will select valuable technology and code under FOSS licenses, and from companies using LibreOffice Technology.
Mobile, cloud and peer-to-peer development
Mobile and cloud development management is assigned to Jonathan Clark (leader), with support from Dan Williams, Michael Weghorn and Neil Roberts. The planning and priority goals established are based on Jonathan Clark’s “Web and Mobile Development Strategy Proposal” for the remainder of 2026, and include:
- WebAssembly (WASM) Optimization: Enhancing and polishing our functional prototype based on Qt 6 and WebAssembly. This technological route will run the application robustly and natively directly inside the user’s browser, without overloading hosting servers.
- Accelerating the mobile project: The goal for 2026 involves technical advancement in the graphical user interface (GUI) code and testing builds on Android and iOS emulators, with advisory support from Dan Williams for iOS-specific topics.
- Smart collaborative editing: We will initiate practical collaborative editing tests using a stable client-server architecture (via direct TCP/IP connections), paving the way before advancing to peer-to-peer (P2P) network research.
Conclusion
The Document Foundation is challenged to evolve and expand LibreOffice to other computing platforms, and include collaboration editing. This requires changes in the current team activities, mission and organization. The Board and the team are fully committed to addressing these challenges and reporting to the public the development and achievements obtained. Freedom has never been so valuable for the LibreOffice community.
