Microsoft's Outlook for Android app for phones and tablets now generally available
Microsoft is removing the "preview" tag from its Outlook for Android app for phones and tablets, as of April 22.
Since the first preview, Microsoft has updated the Outlook for Android code base 17 times, or more than once a week, Microsoft officials said in a blog post announcing general availability. There have been UI changes, performance, stability, localization and accessibility changes in that time.
The new Outlook Android app supports Office 365, Exchange, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and IMAP providers like AOL.com and Comcast.net.
Microsoft plans to replace the Outlook Web Apps for iOS and Android, as well as the Outlook.com app for Android with these new Outlook apps. That won't happen overnight; the Outlook Web Apps and Outlook.com app will remain in the respective app stores for several months. But Microsoft plans to "sunset" Outlook Web Apps and the Outlook.com app for iOS and Android by summer, officials have said.
The new Outlook mail and calendar apps for Windows Phones (currently in preview) is meant to look and feels very similar to the Outlook for Android and iOS apps, even though the Windows Phone versions are not based on the Acompli code base.
The Outlook for Android app is free and runs on Android 4.0 and above. It's available in all markets supported by the Google Play Store. The UI has been translated into 30 languages: English, Norwegian (Bokmål), Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
In other Office for Android-related news, Microsoft is in the midst of rolling out a number of new Intune features allowing administrators to better lock down Office mobile apps on Android, among other new features.