OneDrive for Business Client Platform Support

OneDrive for Business is a service that delivers file sharing and synchronization across platforms and devices, from Microsoft-hosted or on-premises file storage. The most important OneDrive for Business clients (top) and the types of file storage and features they support (left) are summarized here.

OneDrive for Business offers clients on Windows PCs (and Mac OS X, which is not shown here), as well as a browser-based interface and mobile apps for devices running Android, iOS, and Windows Phone (not shown here). These clients vary in their capabilities: the desktop client for Windows is integrated into the File Explorer, where it shows hosted folders as directories and lets users treat storage as an extension of a local drive. Browser-based and mobile clients show hosted folders and let users access them directly from the browser or app.

In most cases, these clients provide a “unified” experience, where users can access files from both Microsoft-hosted and on-premises file storage, as well as from their consumer OneDrive storage. A user’s OneDrive for Business files are actually stored in SharePoint per-user libraries. SharePoint Team Sites files (and Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams shared files) are also accessible through these clients. As of Dec. 2016, almost all versions of the OneDrive for Business client can access files from both on-premises SharePoint Server and Microsoft-hosted SharePoint Online storage; the Android-based client cannot yet access on-premises files. Most clients can display both OneDrive for Business-hosted storage and consumer OneDrive files from the same client; browser-based access is not currently unified here.