Unnecessary retirement of Microsoft Office Lens

Microsoft began cutting support for Microsoft Lens in 2025, suggesting users try OneDrive instead for creating digital scans. Microsoft Lens supported saving scanned documents to local storage; however, OneDrive does not allow this.^[1][2]

Microsoft Lens (formerly known as Office Lens) is a piece of software within Microsoft Office 365 which allows users to create digital copies of written documents using the camera on a smart device.^[3] These documents could be saved either to Microsoft's OneDrive or to the local storage on the user's device. Users were required to be signed in to a Microsoft account with a valid Office 365 subscription in order to use the app.^[3]

In August 2025,^[4] Microsoft announced that it would retire Microsoft Lens on September 15, 2025. The retirement was subsequently extended, with in-app scanning capability remaining available until later dates.^[2] The app was removed from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store on February 9, 2026, and after March 9, 2026, Microsoft Lens was completely disabled on devices that still had it installed. It remained possible to access locally saved documents as long as the user had a Microsoft account with a valid Office 365 subscription.^[2]

Instead of using Microsoft Lens, Microsoft recommended that users employ the built-in scanning feature in OneDrive. However, this feature does not support saving scanned files to local storage, unlike Microsoft Lens did.^[5][2]

Coverage of the retirement noted that the replacement workflow removed functionality consumers relied on, since the OneDrive scanner forces every scanned document into cloud storage with no local save option.^[5]