Microsoft has just launched its flagship hardware products for the holiday season of 2019. These are the products such as Microsoft Surface 7 and the Surface Laptop 3. However, the company also announced a new tablet/iPad Pro competitor named as the Surface Pro X. This, along with the announcements of foldable devices in the Surface lineup has brought Microsoft back on track in the game. Although the foldable devices from Microsoft are just announced and coming 12 months later, we know that the company is committed to that form factor as well.
Talking about Microsoft, we know that the company runs an assistant which competes with the likes of Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri named as Cortana. But we also know that the Cortana Assistant from Microsoft has not made a mark on the industry as the likes of Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri have. Now, we have a major announcement related to Cortana from Microsoft. The news is that Microsoft has decided to kill its Cortana app on both the Android and iOS platforms. We know that Cortana is an assistant used mostly by Windows users since they have no other options.
However, Android and iOS users have plenty of other options which means Cortana is not something they are likely to make use of. Thus, it makes sense for Microsoft to kill the Android and iOS apps and instead focus on making its Windows version better. Having said that, Microsoft also revealed that the app is going away from markets such as UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, China, Spain, Canada, and India on January 31st.
Notably, the US is not included in the list because Cortana’s Android and iOS apps will be available in the US app store from Microsoft. The company also reveals that “we’re integrating Cortana deeper into your Microsoft 365 productivity apps” which is why they need to discontinue the Android and iOS apps.