Simple little apps that can be replaced by RIP, Microsoft lenses, and AI

It's great to have a simple app that does one thing well without making a fuss from time to time.

Microsoft Lens was that type of app. This is a mobile document scanner that transforms paper documents, business cards, receipts, and more into easy-to-read digital files. Currently, the app has been aborted, so Microsoft will instead direct users to the Copilot AI chat app.

According to new support documents, the lens will be deprecated from iOS and Android devices from September 15, 2025, and will be removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play on November 15, 2025. Existing users will be able to continue using the app's scanning feature until December 15th, 2025.

First launched in 2015, Microsoft Lens (known at the time as Office Lens) evolved from an application designed for Windows Phone devices. Its core functionality was similar to other mobile scanning applications, but it never recharged users or pushed them to subscriptions for certain features. This is rare in today's app stores.

Instead, I performed a task of flipping handwritten or other notes into a selected file format, such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or an image, for document, receipt, business card, or whiteboard doodles. It also provided a variety of built-in filters, including enhancing the resulting image, brightening the document, and turning it into a black and white copy.

You can then save the file to Microsoft apps, other online services, or to a camera roll. It was simple and worked.

The imminent shutdown of the app was first discovered by the site BleepingComputer. This points to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app that doesn't have all the features found in the lens. Copilot can handle scans, but it also doesn't support storing those scans directly in OneNote, Word, or PowerPoint, and doesn't save business card scans to OneNote. It also doesn't have accessibility features for the lens, such as Read-Out-Roud or immersive reader integration.

Despite its age, the lens has been quite popular, attracting over 322,000 downloads on the App Store and Google Play over the past 30 days, according to data from the App Intelligence Provider Appfigures. It has been downloaded 92.3 million times since January 2017, the company's data shows.

Microsoft has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding its decision to shut down the lens.