Microsoft to snatch Visio app from iOS users this summer • The Register

Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.

As we wrote, the enterprise software program large this week shocked Mac customers by making its Outlook for Mac app free to make use of. Customers can obtain the app from the Apple App Retailer and get to work on their electronic mail account – Outlook, iCloud, Google, no matter – without having a Microsoft 365 subscription or license.

Nonetheless, these utilizing Microsoft’s Visio instrument for diagrams and vector graphics by the app on their iPhones and iPads solely have just a few extra months earlier than the app is not accessible.

On the identical day that the Outlook for Mac information got here out, Microsoft confirmed the Visio Viewer app shall be faraway from the Apple App Retailer on August 14 and customers will finally should get one among two Visio subscriptions or by a brand new or current Microsoft 365 subscription.

As soon as the app is faraway from Apple’s retailer, these with it put in on their units will be capable to proceed utilizing it, for some time at the least.

“Beginning August 14, 2023, current installations of the app on iPhone and iPad units will proceed to work,” Microsoft product supervisor Abhinav Chatterjee writes in a blog post. “Nonetheless, over time, the mixing with companies like OneDrive and SharePoint will break. Moreover, customers won’t have the choice to re-install the app on their iOS machine if the app is uninstalled or they’ve switched units.”

This comes as Microsoft builds out the capabilities of Visio for the net, launched greater than six years in the past as Visio On-line, Chatterjee writes. Particularly, the corporate says it has since enhanced how customers view and share recordsdata for Visio drawings housed in Microsoft’s OneDrive file internet hosting service and its SharePoint on-line collaboration platform.

Microsoft desires to close down the Visio Viewer app for iOS units to provide engineers extra time to enhance Visio for the net, Chatterjee writes.

The seller is already giving directors a heads-up by notifications within the Microsoft 365 Message heart.

For individuals who acquired a message, “it means a number of folks in your group are utilizing the Visio Viewer app for iOS,” Chatterjee writes. “For those who didn’t obtain a notification within the Message heart, then you definately needn’t take any motion.”

Visio provides customers a variety of templates and stencils for taking information, textual content, and tables and placing them into visible diagrams that embody the whole lot from organizational charts and workflows to floorplans and Venn, pyramid, and community diagrams.

Microsoft has owned the know-how since shopping for Visio Company in 2000.

Microsoft is laying out the alternative ways iOS customers – and any person, actually – can join Visio, both by Microsoft 365 (the instrument is out there in all business plans) and Visio Plan 1 or Plan 2. It additionally outlines the forms of diagrams every will help.

Customers can also use Visio for the net and not using a license by signing right into a Microsoft 365 account and importing the Visio file to OneDrive, the place it may be opened within the browser however solely seen in a read-only view. As well as, Visio Viewer lets customers open, view, and print Visio drawings however not create, edit, or save.

Visio for the net can be utilized not solely with Edge but in addition Apple Safari 10+, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox. ®