Microsoft, Please Bring Outlook Mobile to Windows 10 (Premium)

Some eagle-eyed readers have noticed that I’ve moved to Microsoft Outlook on my smartphones, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s the best email client I’ve ever used. It’s so good, in fact, that I am curious why we can’t take advantage of its superior user experience on Microsoft’s core client platform, Windows 10.

Microsoft, please. Bring Outlook Mobile to Windows 10.

For those unfamiliar, Microsoft’s new mobile strategy is very much like its strategy with Xbox: The firm has lost the battle, and so it is focusing on the next war instead. With Xbox, that means making lemonade in the wake of its defeat in consoles and delivering the very best gamer-centric set of services anywhere while positioning itself for the cloud-based gaming services of the future.

In mobile, this means retreating from its first-party Windows phone platform and meeting customers where they are: Android and iOS. And in doing so, building the very best mobile clients imaginable.

The net result in both cases is a win for customers.

I’ve already written a lot about the awesomeness of Xbox as its expanded past the console, but today I’d like to focus on mobile. And for two reasons: It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And this week, Microsoft just announced major updates to Outlook on Apple’s mobile platforms that support new features in the latest versions of those platforms (iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS).

The language Microsoft uses in its new Outlook post is telling. It knows that users have choices, in both devices and apps. For the former, this means supporting the devices that its customers actually use—again, Android handsets and iPhones and iPads—and in the latter, it means offering choices that must beat whatever apps come pre-installed on those devices. For Outlook, that means competing with some solid choices: Gmail and Google Calendar on Android and Mail and Calendar on iOS/iPadOS.

I’ve sort of ping-ponged between different mobile apps over the years, and between different strategies. This year, as I’ve purchased and reviewed several expensive smartphone flagships, for example, I worked to use the apps and services that came on each, where possible, for example. That means I used Samsung Internet on the Note 10+ and Safari on the iPhone, instead of my usual choice(s) (Chrome or Edge).

For email and calendar, I’ve always been pretty comfortable with Gmail (and before that, Inbox) and Google Calendar, and on both Android and iPhone. (I’ve never liked Apple’s built-in apps for whatever reason.) But I have used Outlook Mobile a lot over the years, sometimes just for my Microsoft accounts, and sometimes in a secondary role.

I feel very strongly that we should all use the best solutions, regardless of our personal affiliation with whatever brand, company, or product. For Apple fans, my advice is to look very closely at third party alternatives in all cases—mail, calendar, music, whatever—before accepting the Matrix-like soothing numbness of succumbing to Apple’s lock-in. There are almost always better choices available out there.

On Android, it’s a little more complicated because Google’s apps and services are almost always first-rate if not best-of-breed. Gmail and Calendar, and things like Google Maps and even Google Play Music, are all excellent. They’re often the best choice.

But I’ve never been very good at taking my own advice. Part of that is a sense of loyalty to my job, where I feel like I need to keep up on what’s going on out in the world and with whatever changes are coming to various apps over time. Lately, however, with all the moving back and forth between devices—whether it’s the many smartphones I’ve tested this year or the many laptops I’ve reviewed—I’ve also felt the fatigue. It’s a pain configuring all those apps, using different apps on different devices. Sometimes I just want to be a normal user. Just use the best apps, the best services. And do so all the time.

And increasingly, I’ve found that Outlook Mobile is the best app on both iPhone and Android. That it can replace two apps—Gmail and Google Calendar—is useful from an on-screen real estate perspective is interesting. That I can consolidate multiple accounts in a single place (possible in other apps, too, yes) is likewise useful, and it conforms to what I discovered earlier this year during my Email Experiment: That consolidating email on the client is superior to doing so in the cloud.

The problem, of course, is that doing this in Windows 10 is lousy. And it’s lousy because we have to use Windows Mail, which is terrible. (And Windows Calendar, which is actually fine.)

I’ve already explained my stance on Mail many times, and I’m not going to repeat my complaints here. Nor am I at all interested in any defense of this terrible application. If you can use this app and not hate yourself, congratulations. But my standards are higher and I need a superior application, not some cobbled-together Fisher-Price mess.

What I need is Outlook Mobile. On Windows 10.

Microsoft, please. Bring Outlook Mobile to Windows 10.

You can get a feel for how good this app is on the big screen by looking at the iPad animation in this week’s Microsoft post. But suffice to say that Microsoft has taken its phone-based Outlook Mobile app and really tailored it to work well on a bigger screen. And it’s now taking advantage of the latest advances in iPadOS too.

Microsoft should do this on Windows 10, too. Outlook Mobile could be adapted to Microsoft’s core client platform and become that thing that Mail very much is not, a showcase for what is possible when you have the power and utility of a full-blown desktop OS at your back. It could be a combination of simple user experience and functionality. It could be great.

The other option, of course, is to adapt Outlook.com or Outlook on the web into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and to work natively with multiple accounts of different types (and not just support forwarding/receiving mail from other clients). That would achieve the same goal, assuming it was done properly. And tellingly, both of those web-based services are also much, much better than Mail on Windows 10.

Look, I’m trying to be as realistic as possible. I know that Microsoft doesn’t really give a crap about Windows 10, nor has it ever shown any interest in fixing things that are horribly broken but already shipping. But email/calendar/contacts/tasks is so core to the software giant’s central point of being, so in keeping with the direction in which it’s going. This should be fixed not because it’s part of Windows 10, but because Outlook, unlike Windows, is indeed core to the company’s future.

Microsoft, please. Bring Outlook Mobile to Windows 10.