Microsoft Lens is retired. Here is what to use instead.

Yes. Microsoft retired Lens in early 2026: it was removed from the app stores on February 9, 2026 and stopped scanning on March 9, 2026. Scans you already made stay viewable in the app while it is installed, but you cannot make new ones. Microsoft suggests the scanner in OneDrive instead, which saves scans only to OneDrive.

Filex AI replaces the scanning and adds what Lens never did. Point your phone at a document and Filex AI reads the page with OCR, works out what kind of document it is, names it from the content, files it into the right folder, and pulls out the dates and amounts inside, with no manual step.

It is also not tied to Microsoft 365. Whether your other files live in iCloud, Google Drive or nowhere in particular, every scan joins one searchable library on iPhone, Android and the web.

If you used Lens for quick scans into Word or OneDrive and nothing more, OneDrive scan will feel familiar. If the friction was always what happened after the scan, naming, filing and finding it again, Filex AI is the better replacement.

Microsoft Lens deserved credit for being genuinely free with no meaningful feature gating on the scanning itself. That is a real, practical positive compared to scanner apps that watermark or paywall basic capture.

But "free to scan" and "organized automatically" are separate promises, and Microsoft Lens only makes the first one. Every scan still needs a destination chosen by a person, and a name that person either types or accepts by default. Over dozens of scans that is manageable. Over hundreds, it becomes the actual bottleneck, regardless of how much the scanning itself cost.

Filex AI treats the organization step as included by default, not as a premium add-on. The free Spark plan performs the same automatic reading, renaming, and filing as every other plan — the free tier limits how much the AI processes, not whether the documents it does process are properly organized.

Microsoft Lens was genuinely well designed for its intended audience: people whose documents, calendar, and daily work already run through Office and OneDrive. For that audience, the export path from scan to usable file is short and convenient.

Outside that audience, the same design becomes a limitation. A document scanned into OneDrive is not automatically visible or organized anywhere else. Someone using Google Drive, a different cloud provider, or simply storing files locally gains little from Lens beyond a basic free scanner, with none of the ecosystem convenience that is its main selling point.

Filex AI has no equivalent ecosystem dependency. Every document, regardless of source device or cloud provider, joins the same searchable library, renamed and filed the same way. It is a more portable choice for anyone whose documents do not live entirely inside one company's suite of products.

Microsoft's own replacement is the scan feature in the OneDrive app. It captures documents and saves them to OneDrive; it cannot save scans locally, and like Lens it leaves naming and filing to you.

To keep your old Lens scans, open the Lens app while it is still on your phone, go to My Scans, and share or save each one to Files, Photos or OneDrive. Microsoft no longer supports this, so do it soon.

Then add those exported scans to Filex AI in one go. It reads every scan, names it from what it says, files it, and makes your whole Lens archive searchable, and every new scan you make in Filex AI is organized the same way.