Microsoft and Apple have entered a major partnership that a lot of the two companies’ consumers will benefit from: the official addition of Microsoft Office, including Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word, to the Mac App Store.
Apple’s senior director of worldwide developer relations, Shaan Prude says, “One of the features that we brought specifically in working with Microsoft was the ability to subscribe to bundles, which is obviously something that they would need in order to bring Office 365 to the Mac App Store.”
Apparently, it was only in 2018 when Apple overhauled their App Store when the ability to roll several apps into a single subscription was added as a feature. The App Store’s inability to bundle was the main reason why this didn’t happen sooner, as reported by TechCrunch.
Corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, explained that since Microsoft sells its subscriptions to Office 365 as a complete package, it didn’t want to “alter the experience by forcing customers to download each one individually”.
Apple users had always been free to go to Microsoft’s online site and purchase there directly, of course, but now that the entire Office suite is available on the App Store, the update process will be much smoother for users.
