I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)
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Which general topic do you have
Hi Nextcloud
Thank you for your overall very impressive platform, and ease of install for selfhosting.
In these times when thousands of european companies and public institutions are shifting away from US vendors in dire need for a stable European office platform, it is of utmost importance, that the most basic end user features are super stable and critical bugs are fixed immediately.
For many weeks sheets have been completely unusable on mobile browser and app. And there is no way this can be explained or reasoned to any client or end user using sheets in real life production.
What are reasonable expectations to have regarding such bugs which just renders basic document handling unusable?
How are updates and bugfixes priotized, in order to leave sheets, which many would consider an office platform strict requirement, unusable for real production?
Nextcloud teams have an internal Roadmap and they stick to it. Stability, they couldn’t care less IMO (you’ll see new features shipped more easily than important bug fixes).
One example: people report bugs in RCs versions (the main goal of RCs, no?), but no fixes before final releases will be included (on Github, you’ll find some of these easily).
Also, Nextcloud has a “commercial first” approach: if you’re using Nextcloud on Enterprise, or where Nextcloud is important to you, buy a subscription support and your bugs will get “priority”.
Otherwise: fix the bugs by yourself, pay someone to fix them, or simply wait weeks/months/years until someone fixes them.
A side not on stability is that i have had issues with teams for example where bug takes time to get fixed. Last year i had a several month long issue with crashes for all my teams meetings.
Testing today via the Nextcloud Instant Trial (COOLWSD 24.04.9.3) reveals similar critical problems with sheets in a browser.
Laptop scrolling conflicts with some kind og auto or lazy creation of columns. The UX is not smooth at all
Mobile viewing or editing is almost useless. Content disappearing on pinch zoom. Cells not visible when editing. Scrolling on 24.04.9.3 works better. Scrolling on 24.04.13.3 is useless. Same thing via mobile app, which I suppose internally also is using a browser.
Thanks @jtr, for pointing out the differences between versions. I suppose the above examples clarify that this is a general problem?
Sheets is a critical component in a modern office suite.
Sheets are buggy on desktop browsers and useless on mobile browser and app.
This seems to be a consistent problem not fixed for many weeks.
How does other vendors or clients react to this?
Is there some kind of “secret” more stable older version that should be used for aio instead of “stable” branches? Does enterprise clients have some other more stable branch installed?
We seriously want this platform to succeed, but how do we proceed if critical office components are just left unusable for such a long time?
Nextcloud Summit 2025 is just around the corner. I would love to see one official speaker present the agenda using sheet from her own phone.
Hi @SmallOne, I totally agree that anybody could just go ahead and fix bugs and feature requests themselves. This is the open source way, and we support that at all times.
However, this is a candidate platform for switching away from Google Docs, Microsoft Office etc. so I would very much not start the transitioning by fixing “scrolling and editing sheets on mobile browsers”
You consider this production ready for enterprise and governments, which makes me very optimistic, but are you able to access an editable shared sheet in a mobile browser and scroll in the content and edit cells without any problems?
What versions are you deploying for government production? I should very much like to use that very same setup.
pls have in mind that the problem seems to be connected with Collabora which is a so-called “3rd party”.
It means that Nextcloud, the company, isn’t responsible for coding of this nice piece of work. Collabora only is.
So why do you put your rant here? It would make more sense to put it on some of the collabora forums. Though I think rants in general are very rarely getting the awareness the author (of the rant) is hoping to get.
I saw as well that you are already taking part in the discussion on github. why not keeping it there?
anyways… this rant was one of the nicer rants on here. Thank you for keeping it nice and friendly.
As for now I don’t see anything for Nextcloud, the company, to do to solve that problem, I’m afraid.
and last but not least, welcome to the community forum for Nextcloud, the software. Nice that you are here
I apologize for the rant:) I was just expecting that Nextcloud would have to make sure that the basic functionality of Nextcloud Office was indeed ready for production, and critical bugs -which of course can happen once in a while, are fixed fast.
In this case, the bug report for CollaboraOnline in github has been open for three months, and I am hoping bigger partners would weigh in on, that every bug preventing basic use of Nextcloud Office must be prioritized.
My post here is not about that actual bug. Im mainly concerned about what level of stability and predictability is to be expected, if we as a decentral community are using the same set of admirable open source products. Our specific goal is to use the Nextcloud selvhosted solutions, and be able to depend on them for stable production.
Maybe Im just missing some information about how to choose the exact most stable battle-tested not at all bleeding edge and secure versions. I would assume that Nextcloud might know about this, since the Instant trial does not use the most recent stable versions of CollaboraOnline.
For sure I have the utmost respect for the work being done by all parties of this, and the total enterprise is indeed a glorious path for a digital autonomous future.
@SmallOne already said some important things about that above.
I’d like to add: NC does it’s testings with severeal levels and multiple versions of Beta and RC candidates before releasing a new major version. xy.0.0. on the forum we usually suggest to wait to install new versions to productive system with minor version xy.0.2 - usually that’s safe to install without any big bugs in it.
As I said before, Collabora is a company of it’s own and Nextcloud is just a “client” as well. Even though the product is called Nextcloud Office if you want to install it directly (which has its pros and cons, of course). You can run your own instance as well, if you want to.
So Nextcloud has no real say in apps coming from a 3rd party-
I don’t know if it would be possible for NC to downgrade to a working Collabora-version. I guess no, not possible.
If you would buy support from Nextcloud I don’t know if that would help in that case and if NC, the company, could prioritysize said bug on collabora. You need to talk to them in person to find out.
In general we - the forummembers - are running the free version (called communityversion as well) which comes as it is. With no guarantee that everything would work battleproof.
if you’d need such a version best choice would really be: buy professional support for it (the NC-version for companies is basically the same). And you’ll get your bugs down with a higher priority.
Sadly enough that’s more or less all I can tell you here and from my side.
Thank you for your clarification and support regarding how to proceed.
I don’t think paying for support as a small player like us, is the way for the community and brand to get critical UX problems fixed in such an important module/app. If fixing mobile UX in sheets is not a general critical priority for neither Collabora or Nextcloud, Im not sure I see a promising way forward for us to commit to the platform.
We do work and contribute with other open source platforms, but again, It doesn’t feel right to start out debugging, coding and contributing even before we are able to use said product.
However so many other things are working really well out of the box, so I do have hope this is just an unlucky anomaly.
I will keep digging in hopes of finding a way to identify some kind of “stable distro” and a way to selfhost the platform in sustainable way.
@martinb14
Nextcloud as you use it is a large construction kit made up of a wide variety of products in large parts by free developers. Collabora Online, even if it is called Nextcloud Office, is ultimately a third-party component that is largely not written by Nextcloud developers.
I don’t know how quickly a problem with Microsoft Excel will be solved if you call Microsoft because of your licence fees. But because of the money and users, bugs may be noticed faster and patched faster.
If you use free software, you should be able to solve some problems yourself or have to pay for them. In addition, there will always be bugs that are not solved promptly. You have to be flexible. It can help to use the old release temporarily in the event of a bug (good test environment). You should also be familiar with backup/restore. Since Nextcloud is practically free, you can also provide multiple instances with multiple claims. For example, a pure file-sharing installation could completely dispense with Nextcloud Office.
If you are 100% dependent on Collabora Calc, it may be a risk to use it. But that is probably the risk of any cloud service that only exists once for the entire company.
Yearh, I wouldn’t count on MS to pick up the phone either:)
However this is about a general common alignment about what is critical, and what is lower priority. And maybe mobile UX in sheets is just not something the community as a whole see as a priority.
I would just assume that right at this moment in time when finally a significant traction towards european digital platforms is present, we would not have to convince end users that mobile interfaces at the moment is unfortunately not supported for sheets.
In my opinion, this UX particular problem will immediately disqualify the platform, for all potential clients using sheets at all.
And in general, any potential platform to convert production from MS/Google etc. in the office domain, must provide a certain high level of consistent UX across devices.
I know that goal is not at all easy to accomplish, but it seems to be well within reach using the Nextcloud stack.
I totally agree. But sometimes in a large community, I would assume larger coorporations would have the very same problem, and therefore I would not have to fix issues regarding core functionality, as a brand new or smaller vendor.
And sometimes it simply doesn’t work because big companies like Google are abusing their market monopoly. Unfortunately, there are far too many companies that - because it’s easier - back the market leader or winner. So of course Nextcloud is the wrong choice.
I could also explain why Nextcloud is not financially worthwhile, at least if you still need Microsoft Office products. And that is because Microsoft uses its client monopoly for Office programmes to rule the cloud as well. But most companies don’t care about that either, as licence costs are paid for via the companies’ products anyway.
off topic and not the latest news. next android app version should work again as all the years before since G00gle regranted missing rights and permissions.
They pushed some apps to become “official” apps, meaning that they provide support for their enterprise customers. They provide some details, but its not publicly available:
(so from this point of view, I don’t know if the whole office is covered, or if you need an extra subscription with collabora, and if it is covered, the mobile apps are also part of it).
I don’t know how common it is to use sheets over a mobile app for different users. I suppose there are many where you just work from your computer in the office and you don’t have a professional mobile phone…
Honestly, if you are interested, and if that is important, just contact their customer service.
You are writing here with volunteers from a community forum. We are neither seller, developer, project owner nor support of the Office package or its integration. Please take this into account when drawing your conclusions.
It is. But not for mobile browser use. (many of my clients would never even consider editing a sheet in a mobile browser at all, not even with googles or microsofts mobile apps either)
