Office Lens for Android Exits Preview

Almost two months after shipping the first preview version of Office Lens for Android—or as the software giant now calls it, Office Lens Android—Microsoft has taken the app out of preview. Microsoft says that over 130,000 Google+ community previewers and over 70,000 downloads later, it’s ready for prime time.

Office Lens Android was the only version of this app that required a preview period, but that’s actually pretty common for Microsoft mobile apps. And for a reason: With this app alone, Microsoft telemetry recorded over 270 makes of phones and just under 2,600 phone models. This diversity makes testing and delivering reliable Android apps difficult, I’d imagine.

What’s odd, however, is that Microsoft’s post about this release also explains that the Android version of Office Lens has been, by far, the least often downloaded. The Windows Phone version, which first shipped in March 2014, has seen over 3.5 million downloads, compared to 1.3 million on iPhone and just 70,000 on Android. Granted, the iPhone and Android versions are much newer, but that doesn’t explain the disparity between the downloads on those platforms (since they both shipped at the same time).

Microsoft notes that Office Lens offers the following features on all three platforms.

Converts images of paper documents, electronic screens and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and searchable PDF files for easy storage, editing and reformatting.

Enables images to be sent via email, making it easy to share whiteboard notes with work colleagues, submit scanned business expense receipts or ensure family and friends have copies of important paper documents.

Captures business cards and generates contacts, which can be sent to OneNote and added to your phone.

Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image.

Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by keyword for the image in OneNote or OneDrive.

Inserts images to OneNote or as DOCX, PPTX or PDF files in OneDrive, providing options to save, export and share the image.

See anything missing? Access the Office Lens UserVoice site and provide Microsoft with some feedback.

I highly recommend Office Lens, and install it on all of my smart phones. Here are the download links.

Office Lens for Windows Phone

Office Lens for iPhone

Office Lens for Android