OneDrive Universal App is Now Available for Windows 10

No, these are not the placeholders you’re looking for. But Microsoft last night released a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for OneDrive, providing those with Windows 10-based PCs, tablets, and phones with a way to view all of the contents their OneDrive storage.

There’s just one big caveat: You need to be online to use this app. In other words, it’s just a mobile app, and is really just a UWP version of the OneDrive modern app that Microsoft shipped over three years ago with Windows 8.0.

Still, such a thing is very useful, even on PCs. And it’s unclear why this app simply wasn’t included as part of Windows 10 when that OS first arrived last summer.

And there have been improvements since that original modern app. The new OneDrive UWP app features a now-common UWP user interface, with a hamburger control in the upper left that toggles a pane with top-level views—All files, Photos, Recent documents, Shared, and Recycle Bin—plus other accounts and settings.

And yes, you can configure multiple accounts: The app will automatically sign-in to your Microsoft account if you are signing in with that account on your PC. But you can also add additional OneDrive (for consumer) and OneDrive for Business accounts as well.

Access to the OneDrive Recycle Bin means you can now restore deleted files from the app, a feature that was previously available only from the web. You can also drag and drop files directly into the app, providing a more elegant way of copying files into OneDrive. As you might expect, you can view OneDrive-hosted photos and videos from the app as well, those it choked on larger videos when I tested it last night.

More is coming, Microsoft says. With a future app update, you will be able to access your company’s SharePoint libraries as well.

You can download OneDrive for Windows from the Windows Store.