Microsoft Lens is shutting down. The app that turned paper documents, receipts, business cards, and whiteboard scribbles into digital files will be gone by November 2025.
Microsoft announced Lens will retire on iOS and Android starting September 15, 2025. It will be removed from app stores on November 15, 2025. Users can keep scanning until December 15, 2025, after which no new scans will be possible. Existing scans stay accessible within the app as long as it remains installed.
This mobile scanner app launched in 2015 as Office Lens, originally for Windows Phone. It stood out for offering free, robust scanning without pushing subscriptions. Lens converted notes and documents to PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or images. It included filters for clarity and color adjustment and saved files to Microsoft apps or the camera roll. 
Users are now being funneled toward the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. But Copilot lacks many Lens features—it doesn’t save scans directly to OneNote, Word, or PowerPoint, nor handle business card scans properly. It also misses accessibility tools like read-out-loud and Immersive Reader.
Despite its age, Lens remains popular. Appfigures data shows it pulled in over 322,000 downloads across the App Store and Google Play in the past 30 days, with 92.3 million total downloads since 2017.
Microsoft has not commented publicly on the Lens shutdown.
“Lens will be retired from iOS and Android devices starting on September 15, 2025, then removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play on November 15, 2025. Existing users will be able to continue to use the app’s scanning capabilities through December 15, 2025. After that date, no new scans will be possible, but access to prior scans will remain in the app as long as it stays on the user’s device.”
— Microsoft support document
