Affiliate Disclosure
If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Read our ethics policy.

Amazon brings Cloud Drive media, document access to iPhone & iPad

Amazon on Monday released an official iOS client for Cloud Drive, allowing people to access content from the file storage service on their iPhone or iPad.

Users of the app can browse files and folders and preview compatible documents, such as photos, text, spreadsheets, and presentations — among them PDF and Microsoft Office files. Direct music and video playback is supported for some media formats.

The ability to preview spreadsheets and presentations is in fact unique to the iOS app, although only the Android clients can sort content by name or date. Cloud Drive is preloaded onto Amazon's Android-based Kindle Fire tablets, but a separate app is available for people running Android 4.2 or later.

iOS sharing functions let users send files via instant messaging, public link, or an email attachment. If necessary, the sharing function also enables opening files in a third-party app. Users cannot, however, upload to Cloud Drive from the app.

Cloud Drive for iOS is a free download, and requires iOS 8.1. The service itself is divided into two tiers: the first, costing $11.99 per year, includes just 5 gigabytes of regular storage, but unlimited photo space. A fully unlimited tier is $59.99 per year.