Microsoft shuts down its Word Flow keyboard for iOS, suggests downloading SwiftKey instead
After the experiment has been completed, Microsoft has closed down its Word Flow keyboard on iOS. — Back in February of this year we took a closer look at Microsoft's Word Flow keyboard on iOS …
Context & Ripple Effects
Word Flow began life as Windows Phone's keyboard before Microsoft ported it to iOS, entering private beta in early 2016 and shipping publicly that April with a fanned one-handed layout and custom backgrounds. Microsoft kept investing through the year, adding built-in Bing-powered search for GIFs, images, contacts, and the web in August.
The shutdown folds that experiment into SwiftKey, the keyboard Microsoft already owns, and reads as consolidation rather than retreat from iOS keyboards — though the related coverage shows where this road ends: five years later Microsoft would end support for SwiftKey on iOS entirely, keeping it only on Android.
First-order effects
- Existing Word Flow users lose updates and are redirected to SwiftKey, which inherits Microsoft's entire iOS keyboard user base overnight.
- Microsoft retires a product it had actively expanded just months earlier, cutting maintenance and feature work on Word Flow to zero.
Second-order effects
- SwiftKey becomes the sole carrier of Microsoft's keyboard ambitions on iOS, raising the stakes on an app whose own iOS future would later be cut off in the 2022 delisting.
- Rival third-party keyboard makers on iOS face a competitor backed by Microsoft's distribution funnel — until that backing is withdrawn, leaving the category thinner.
Third-order effects
- The episode previews a recurring Microsoft pattern of the era: acquire or port a consumer app onto rival platforms, run it as an experiment, then consolidate or abandon it when engagement doesn't justify the cost — a discipline that later claimed SwiftKey on iOS too.
- For iOS users, each such shutdown narrows the viable third-party keyboard field, pushing typing back toward Apple's built-in options and making standalone keyboard apps a riskier purchase.
The trend: Microsoft's Windows Phone-era experiments at reaching users on rival platforms are being retired one by one, with its iOS footprint steadily narrowing to a core set of services.