Elevate your apps in Google Drive

By Nicolas Garnier, Developer Relations

When Google Drive launched, we also introduced the Google Drive SDK, which enables you to deeply integrate your apps into Drive. Using the Drive SDK, you can offer your users an experience similar to how Google Docs or Google Sheets interact with Drive. More than a hundred web apps now integrate with Google Drive in this way.

Today we are making several changes to Google Drive to help users more easily discover, connect and use these Drive-enabled apps.


Google Drive Create menu

The Google Drive Create menu now elevates Drive-connected apps to the same level as Google apps such as Docs and Sheets. This makes your Drive-connected apps easier to reach and more visible to Google Drive users.

New Google Drive Create menu

As you can see, we’ve made some space in the Create menu for your apps, which users can add by clicking on Connect more apps.


Browse and Connect Drive-enabled Apps

Google Drive users can now browse and connect Drive-enabled apps right from within Drive thanks to the new Connect apps to Drive dialog:

Connect some Google Drive-enabled web apps to your Drive

After installing an app, users can instantly start using your Drive app to create or open files directly from within Drive.

Opening a file in Google Drive with a connected app

If your app is already Google Drive-enabled and listed in the Chrome Web Store’s Drive collection, you don’t have to do anything new to take advantage of these new features. We will automatically pull all the information from your existing Chrome Web Store listing.

If your web app is not yet Google Drive-enabled, check out how you can integrate with the create-new and the open-with actions and then get your Drive-enabled app listed in the new Connect apps to Drive dialog.


Nicolas Garnier joined Google’s Developer Relations in 2008 and lives in Zurich. He is a Developer Advocate for Google Drive and Google Apps. Nicolas is also the lead engineer for the OAuth 2.0 Playground.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor