Blind man walking with a dog

This year, Microsoft announced that its document scanning app Microsoft Lens (formerly Office Lens) will be retired. Starting in September 2025, new downloads will stop. By December, you won’t be able to create new scans. If you’ve used Lens for years, that’s frustrating.

Genius Scan can fully replace Microsoft Lens, and we even think you will prefer it. Give it a try! Among all document scanning apps, Genius Scan offers the best document scanning quality. Its document detection is faster, and more precise, and its filters are fine tuned to make your documents perfectly legible. Last, Genius Scan supports a direct integration with Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint. Unlike Lens, Genius Scan also supports a large variety of alternative services. You are not stuck with Microsoft.

But that’s not what we wanted to discuss.

We’re here for the long haul

It’s not the first time a big tech company has pulled the plug on a useful, beloved product. There’s even an entire website dedicated to it—the Google Graveyard—a memorial to the dozens (actually, hundreds) of apps and services Google has discontinued over the years. Some were experiments, others were deeply loved, and all disappeared because they no longer fit corporate priorities.

When profit targets or strategic shifts decide the fate of a product, its usefulness to you doesn’t matter.

At The Grizzly Labs, that’s not how we operate.

We’re a small, self-funded team. Genius Scan is not a side experiment or a feature buried inside a bigger product—it’s our product. Our mission since day one has been simple: build the best possible document scanning experience and keep making it better.

That’s why Genius Scan has been around for over 15 years. We’ve seen platforms, design trends, and even entire app categories come and go, but our focus hasn’t changed. We don’t drop features because they’re not “strategic.” We don’t shut down apps because they’re not “core” to a larger portfolio.

No investors to please—just you

When you’re bootstrapped, there’s no quarterly report pushing you to pivot or cut. Our only stakeholders are the people who use Genius Scan every day to run their business, manage their studies, or simply keep their lives organized.

That freedom means we can do things at our own pace and in your best interest. It’s why we’ve continuously shipped improvements—from smart document naming and tagging to advanced export options—without worrying about whether the next “trend” will make us more profitable overnight.

You can count on us

If you rely on Genius Scan, you can keep relying on it. We’re not going to surprise you with a shutdown notice. We’re not going to fold it into another product and call it “simplification.”

We’re here, we’re independent, and we’re obsessed with making document scanning as seamless as it can be.

So while Microsoft Lens joins the list of discontinued apps and the Google Graveyard keeps getting new headstones, Genius Scan will still be right where you left it—ready to capture, organize, and preserve your documents for many more years to come.