Microsoft OneDrive document scanning
Phone scanner built into OneDrive, and Microsoft's official Lens replacement.
Where your files are processed
Reported to upload your files
The vendor states that files are uploaded to their servers. We have not independently tested this.
Treat this as a cloud feature. Scanning happens in the mobile app, but Microsoft's help pages state the scans are saved into OneDrive and that OneDrive does not support saving scans locally on your device, so the resulting PDFs live in Microsoft's service.
What it does
The OneDrive mobile apps include a scanning feature, which Microsoft names as the recommended replacement for the retired Microsoft Lens app. You tap Scan, choose a mode for whiteboards, documents, business cards or photos, capture with flash control, then crop, rotate and apply filters — and on iOS add text or highlight part of the scan. Multiple captures combine into one PDF, saved into OneDrive rather than to the phone.
Best for: Phone users who need paper, whiteboards or receipts turned into PDFs that land in OneDrive automatically, without a third-party scanner app.
Worth knowing: Microsoft states OneDrive does not support saving scans locally on your device, an account is required, and multi-page limits differ by platform — ten pages on Android, thirty on iOS. Microsoft has a separate guide for recognising, searching and copying text in scanned PDFs in OneDrive on Android and iOS, which it marks as rolling out, so the app can read the text in a scan even though the scanning help pages do not mention it. Two things that guide does not establish: whether that recognition is available while viewing rather than embedded into the file, and whether an exported PDF carries a searchable text layer. We have not tested an export. It is not the same as the Lens app it replaced, which produced searchable files directly.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- iOS · Android
- Website
- support.microsoft.com
- Requires an account
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- No
- Data residency
- Multiple regions
- Open source
- Not verified
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
- Not verified
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 132 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish: The WEAKEST SOURCE IN THIS CAMPAIGN, and the caveat is the reason to say so. Microsoft’s support pages render from JavaScript and the Internet Archive has no snapshot of the scanning help article, so the page read is Microsoft’s OneDrive product page — which is about OneDrive as a whole rather than about the document-scanning feature this record covers. It does not mention redaction, and that is a weaker statement than the same finding on a page about the feature. The vendor’s own published material was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout. Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist — it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach — but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote. Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded — not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
-
“To continue using scanning capabilities, we recommend the OneDrive app, which includes a built-in scanning feature.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered in the retirement notice. It is Microsoft's own migration advice rather than a capability claim, and it is the third claim read from this one page — the notice carries the retirement dates, says scanning continues until March 9 2026, and recommends OneDrive as the replacement. Read together, the three entries tell a reader everything they need about a feature being retired and where its users are being sent, which is more than any one of them says alone.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- c2c1a45ccec3689a343a56498859d442e11f4caf7c311543701f39e86f34f4c4
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lens/retirement-of-microsoft-lens re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-support-microsoft-com-en-us-lens-retirement-of-microsoft-l-13d3cefe.txt.
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“The Microsoft Lens app will be retired from iOS and Android devices starting January 9, 2026, and will no longer be supported after February 9.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the retirement notice carries the sentence exactly. This entry matters more than the Lens one, because it is a claim about OneDrive's document scanning rather than about the app being retired: Microsoft's scanning feature in OneDrive reads its capture from Lens, so the retirement dates govern a capability inside a product that is not itself being retired. The page's third date is the practical one — scanning continues until March 9, 2026. A reader who relies on scanning into OneDrive should plan around that date rather than the February 9 date in the claim, and this record is the reason they would know.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- c2c1a45ccec3689a343a56498859d442e11f4caf7c311543701f39e86f34f4c4
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lens/retirement-of-microsoft-lens re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-support-microsoft-com-en-us-lens-retirement-of-microsoft-l-13d3cefe.txt.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked — it is not a judgement about anyone.
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