The Cortana app for Android may be going away

At Microsoft’s Everyday AI event Harry Shum, Executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group, announced that Cortana features would be coming to Microsoft Launcher, raising the prospect of the stand-alone app going away.

Microsoft has already agreed to integrate Cortana with the Cheetah Mobile Android launcher, and Microsoft said today “we hope to integrate Cortana into additional apps and launchers in the future.”

Microsoft’s Cortana App is relatively polished and full-featured and offers a number of widgets, but has less than 5 million downloads in the Google Play Store, while Microsoft’s Launcher has more than 10 million downloads already, suggesting integrating the app may increase Microsoft’s Digital Assistant exposure.

Of course, the risk is that such bundling will make the Launcher, which has a reputation for speed, slow and bloated, something we hope Microsoft considers when developing the new version of the app, which is expected to hit the market early next year.