A Microsoft Lens replacement that keeps documents on your iPhone
Microsoft Lens — for years the default answer to “what's a good free scanner app?” — is gone. If you're one of the millions who relied on it, here's what actually made it special, and how to replace it without handing your paperwork to a cloud.
What happened to Microsoft Lens
Microsoft retired Lens in stages over early 2026: the app was removed from the App Store and Google Play in February 2026, and the scan functionality in already-installed copies was disabled after March 2026. Your previously scanned files remain on your device, but the app won't scan anything new.
Microsoft's suggested replacement is the scanner built into the OneDrive mobile app. It's a capable scanner — but it's a different deal: it requires a Microsoft account, and scans are saved to OneDrive, not to your phone. If Lens earned its place on your Home Screen precisely because it was free, simple, and local, the official successor replaces two of those three.
What Lens got right
Lens quietly did things most scanner apps still charge for or wrap in accounts:
- Genuinely free — no ads, no watermarks, no page limits.
- No forced account for basic scanning.
- Local saving — your scan landed on your device.
- Simple — point, capture, done.
Those four properties are the checklist for any real replacement. Watch out: much of the category runs on subscriptions with free tiers that add watermarks, gate OCR (text recognition), or require cloud accounts. What was ordinary in Lens is now the exception.
The replacement checklist
- Is OCR free and unlimited? Or metered behind a subscription?
- Does it work offline, without an account? Try it in airplane mode.
- Free tier without watermarks or ads?
- Where do scans live? On the device, or on someone's server?
- How does it monetize? A one-time purchase is a different promise than a monthly fee.
Where Foliark fits
We built Foliark for exactly this checklist — and then went two steps further than Lens ever did:
- Free, unlimited, on-device OCR — every scan becomes a searchable PDF, no page limits, no watermarks, no ads.
- No account, no cloud, no analytics — the App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected”, and the whole app works in airplane mode.
- Full-text search — find any paper by what's written on it.
- The Smart Vault files scans automatically by topic, sender, date, and person — on the device. Lens never organized anything; Foliark does it for you.
- Pay once, optionally — power features (merge, AES-256 PDF protection, compression, batch export) are a single one-time purchase. No subscription, ever.
Honest limits, so you can decide fast: Foliark is iPhone-only today (iPad and Android are on the public roadmap), text recognition covers Latin-script languages, and there is deliberately no cloud sync — your documents stay on your device, with an encrypted backup file you store wherever you choose.
Want the detailed comparison against the big subscription scanners? Read Foliark vs Scanner Pro vs Genius Scan.
Facts about Microsoft Lens' retirement are from Microsoft's own support documentation; competitor details reflect vendor pages as of July 2026 and may change.