Bing for iPhone app redesign adds deep links, emphasizes app integration in search
Bing for iPhone makes it easy to jump from search straight to your apps — As Windows Phone continues to struggle, Microsoft has turned its focus towards making its trademark services like Office, Outlook and Bing available on Android and iOS.
Context & Ripple Effects
This redesign lands mid-arc for Bing on rival platforms. In May, Microsoft laid the plumbing with markup that indexes app content and links webpages to it; in August it shipped an Android update doing what Google's Now on Tap promised, beating Google to the punch on screen-context search. The iPhone version now makes that same structure user-visible: search results carry deep links that jump straight into installed apps.
The strategic frame is stated plainly in the article itself — as Windows Phone struggles, Microsoft is pushing its trademark services like Office, Outlook and Bing onto Android and iOS. Bing stops being a funnel into a Microsoft operating system and becomes a standalone service layer inside Apple's and Google's ecosystems.
First-order effects
- iPhone users searching in Bing can go directly from a result into the corresponding action inside an installed app, cutting the browser out of the loop.
- Microsoft gets a durable mobile search surface on iOS without needing Windows Phone hardware, extending the cross-platform push that already put Office and Outlook there.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to match app-integrated search on its own turf — the August Bing-for-Android release already showed Microsoft moving faster than Now on Tap.
- App developers have an incentive to adopt the webpage-to-app markup Microsoft proposed in May, since indexed content feeds these deep-linked results.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the value of a consumer search engine migrates from owning the operating system to occupying the services layer on everyone else's devices — a bet Microsoft doubled down on years later with the chatbot-equipped Bing app on iOS and Android.
The trend: Microsoft is systematically decoupling Bing and its consumer franchises from Windows Phone, rebuilding them as cross-platform services that live natively inside iOS and Android.