Microsoft to remove Office mobile app’s Share Nearby feature in December

If you are one of the consistent users of Share Nearby on the Office mobile app, it is time to bid goodbye now to the file-sharing feature as Microsoft is retiring it next month.

“We have found that the Share Nearby feature to meet some but not all needs,” Rohan Gulati, a product manager at Microsoft, announces in a blog post. “We will be retiring the Share Nearby feature from the Office app as we evolve to offer the best of Microsoft 365 on mobile. This change will affect users of the Office app on Android and will be effective as of December 31, 2022.”

The function allows sending and receiving files between two Android phones via a wireless connection managed by the Office app. The process of sending and receiving files is pretty straightforward and intuitive as long as both phones are running the Office mobile app, but Microsoft seems to have other ideas and plans for file sharing on handheld devices.

“We made this decision as we continue to reassess the value our users derive from the Office app, and we aim to offer experiences that are consistent, reliable and allow our users to be productive across their devices,” Gulati adds. “It is in this pursuit of streamlining our solutions that we have decided to sunset this feature.”

It is unclear if Microsoft plans to replace it with better functionality that will allow sharing of files on other mobile systems and other phones (since it is not available on certain Huawei devices), but the product manager stresses in the blog that the feature can still be accessed until December 31, 2022. After the said date, the feature will be completely removed from the app, while the files formerly shared through it will remain functional.