Google Play / productivity / MICROSOFT OUTLOOK
REVIEW
Outlook on Android is still the Acompli app Microsoft bought, and that's the compliment.
Eleven years after the 2014 Acompli acquisition, the swipe-to-archive, Focused Inbox, calendar-in-the-mail-app DNA is still the best thing about Microsoft's mobile mail client.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Microsoft Outlook
MICROSOFT CORPORATION
OUR SCORE
7.7
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.4
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
Microsoft Outlook on Android is the descendant of Acompli — the startup Microsoft acquired in December 2014 for a reported $200 million. Acompli’s pitch was a mobile email client that took the inbox seriously: swipe gestures that meant what you wanted them to mean, a calendar woven into the mail view, an aggressive auto-prioritization layer that became Focused Inbox. Microsoft rebranded it, ran it through eleven years of platform updates and feature accretion, and the bones are still recognisable. That’s the compliment.
What Outlook on Android does well in 2026 is what Acompli did well in 2014, mostly: it lets you triage email fast with one hand. What’s been added on top is the Microsoft 365 surface area — Teams notifications, OneDrive attachments, shared calendars, and most recently a Copilot-branded layer for draft generation and thread summarization. Some of those additions are useful. Some are upsells. The core inbox experience is still the reason to open this app rather than Gmail.
The honest framing is that Outlook’s Android app is excellent if you have a Microsoft 365 account that you’re paid to use, fine if you have a personal Outlook.com address you’ve kept since 2006, and unnecessary if you’re a Gmail-only user who has never logged into an Exchange server. The Focused Inbox debate, the Copilot pricing, the ads-on-free-accounts decisions — these are the texture of an app that has to serve consumers and enterprise from the same binary, and it shows.
Microsoft bought Acompli for the inbox; eleven years on, the inbox is still why anyone opens this app instead of Gmail.
FEATURES
Outlook on Android is Microsoft's unified mail and calendar client, sitting on top of Exchange, Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo, and IMAP. Multi-account support is the headline: drop a personal Gmail and a work Exchange account into the same app, switch between them with a tap on the avatar in the top-left, or view a combined inbox across all of them.
The Focused Inbox split — a two-tab inbox that machine-sorts mail into "Focused" and "Other" based on signals like sender, frequency, and your own past triage — is on by default and is the feature most users either love or immediately disable. Swipe gestures on each message are configurable per-direction (archive, delete, mark read, flag, move, schedule, snooze). The Calendar tab lives inside the same app rather than as a separate Microsoft Calendar binary; tap an event in a mail thread and it opens in-place.
Teams chat surfaces inline when a colleague mentions you in a channel; Copilot — Microsoft's branded generative AI layer — appears as a "Draft with Copilot" button in the compose sheet and a "Summarize" button on long threads, gated to Microsoft 365 Copilot license holders. The Play page lists the app as free with ads (a banner ad above the inbox for personal-account users, suppressed on work accounts) and in-app purchases for Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The inbox UX is the genuine win and it has been since 2015. Swipe gestures feel right, the snooze-until-tomorrow-morning workflow is the cleanest implementation on Android, and the combined-inbox view across personal and work accounts is something Gmail still doesn't do well. For knowledge workers juggling a 365 account and a personal Gmail in the same day, this is the app that lets you stop switching.
Calendar integration is the other quiet strength. Scheduling a meeting from inside a mail thread, sending availability via "Suggested times", and accepting an invite without leaving the message — these are small affordances that add up. The Android tablet layout uses the wider canvas properly with a three-pane view (folders, list, message) rather than scaling up the phone UI.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Copilot is paywalled to a degree that frustrates non-enterprise users. The "Draft with Copilot" button is visible to everyone but tapping it on a personal account routes to an upsell. Users on free Outlook.com accounts see the AI prompts and can't use them. Microsoft would either hide the UI for unlicensed users or offer a metered free tier; the current state is the worst of both.
Focused Inbox sorts aggressively enough that legitimate mail occasionally lands in "Other" and stays unread for days. The toggle to disable it is in Settings rather than the inbox header, which means most users who hit the problem don't find the fix. Personal-account ad banners are visually loud and harder to dismiss than they should be — pay-to-remove is bundled into Microsoft 365 Basic, which is more than most people want to pay for an ad-free mail app.
CONCLUSION
Install Outlook on Android if you have a Microsoft 365 work account, or if you juggle two or more mail accounts where one of them is Exchange. The combined-inbox plus Calendar integration is the strongest argument. Gmail-only users on Android already have Gmail, which handles the single-account case at least as well. Watch the Copilot pricing posture — Microsoft is clearly betting on AI as the upsell hook, and how that lands with non-enterprise users will shape the next two years of this app.