After nearly a decade of service, Microsoft Lens,the lightweight, no-frills mobile document scanner, is being discontinued. The company confirmed that it will retire the app on September 15, 2025, directing users toward its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI chat app instead.
According to Microsoft’s support documentation, Lens will be pulled from the Apple App Store and Google Play on November 15, 2025. Users will still be able to scan documents until December 15, 2025, but no new scans will be possible after that date. Existing files will remain accessible as long as the app stays installed on the device.
First launched in 2015 as Office Lens for Windows Phone, the app stood out for its simplicity, lack of subscription paywalls, and versatility. It could digitize everything from handwritten notes and business cards to whiteboard scribbles, saving them in formats like PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or images. Built-in filters helped enhance clarity, and documents could be saved directly to Microsoft apps, online storage, or the device’s camera roll.
The shutdown was first reported by Bleeping Computer, which noted that Copilot, while capable of scanning, lacks several Lens features, including direct saving to OneNote, Word, or PowerPoint, as well as business card scanning integrations and accessibility tools like Immersive Reader.
Related: Microsoft Brings OpenAI’s GPT-OSS-20B Model to Windows 11 via AI Foundry
Lens remains a well-loved app, with over 322,000 downloads in the past month alone, per Appfigures. Since January 2017, it has been downloaded 92.3 million times. Microsoft has not yet commented on the reasoning behind the decision.
