Microsoft has started retiring the Microsoft Lens PDF scanner app for Android and iOS devices on Friday, January 9th, with plans to remove it from app stores next month.
Microsoft Lens (previously known as Office Lens) can scan both printed and handwritten text and help users convert images into PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents.
Currently, the app has been downloaded 50 million times on the Google Play Store (where it has over 952,000 reviews with an average rating of 4.9/5) and has nearly 142,000 ratings on Apple’s App Store.
The announcement of its retirement was initially made in August 2025, when Microsoft said the retirement process would begin in mid-September, with new app store installs to be disabled one month later.
However, Microsoft updated the Microsoft 365 Message Center note on Friday with a new timeline and advised users to switch to OneDrive’s document-scanning feature.
“The Microsoft Lens app for iOS and Android will be removed from stores on February 9, 2026, and scanning will stop on March 9, 2026. Users should switch to OneDrive’s scan feature. No admin action is needed; notify users accordingly,” Microsoft said.
“Users can continue to access their previous scans from MyScans in the app after the change while they still have the app on their devices, although this capability will not be supported by Microsoft. Please note that users need to be signed into your last active account on the Microsoft Lens app to access past scans.”
Those who want to switch to OneDrive’s built-in scanning feature have to tap the + button in the bottom corner of the user interface, then tap “Scan photo.”However, they will have to save their scans to OneDrive, since it does not support saving locally.
Microsoft Lens is one of multiple services and apps that the company announced would be killed in recent years. For instance, Microsoft notified Microsoft Authenticator users in May 2025 that the password autofill feature would be deprecated in July, giving them until August 1st to export passwords before the feature became unavailable in the app.
Two months earlier, the company alerted Microsoft Publisher users that the desktop publishing app would no longer be supported and would be removed from Microsoft 365 after October 2026.
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