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Microsoft Lists Updates 2025: Deprecations and New Features
Microsoft Lists has been a handy tool for organizing work, tracking tasks, and building lightweight apps without writing code. But like everything in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, it evolves—and sometimes that means saying goodbye to features we’ve grown used to. Recently, Microsoft announced some big changes, including deprecations, reversals, and some exciting new capabilities. Let’s break it down.
1. The Mobile App Is Going Away
The Microsoft Lists mobile apps for iOS and Android are officially retiring. The app was super convenient. It didn’t have full feature parity with the desktop version, but it was optimized for mobile—quick access, clean UI, and easy navigation. Perfect for field work or quick updates on the go.
If you relied on mobile-specific features like QR scanning, document scanning or in-app image editing, those are gone. For Teams users, Lists will still work as tabs, but the experience will be browser-based.
Use the mobile browser experience at office.com/launch/Lists. It’s more functional now and continues to get updates.
Timeline:
June 2025 – Deprecation notice
September 2025 – New installs blocked
November 15, 2025 – App stops working
2. Power BI Integration Is Being Retired
Remember the “Visualize the List” button? That quick way to spin up a Power BI report from a SharePoint list? It’s going away. It was the fastest way to get insights without leaving SharePoint. One click, and you had a dashboard.
Use Export to Power BI from SharePoint to create a semantic model and auto-generate reports. Or go advanced: connect your list in Power BI Desktop, build your report, and publish it.
Timeline:
November 11, 2025 – No new reports
December 11, 2025 – Existing reports stop working
3. SPFx Field Customizers: The Drama
Microsoft initially planned to retire SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Field Customizers, which let devs inject custom logic into list columns. The community wasn’t happy—JSON formatting is great for 95% of cases, but for complex scenarios (API calls, advanced logic), JSON just doesn’t cut it.
Microsoft listened. They’ve canceled the retirement at least for now.
4. Action Required: Browser Policy for OneDrive & SharePoint
Browsers are phasing out third-party cookies, and Microsoft uses them for offline access and performance optimizations in OneDrive and SharePoint. If you don’t configure the new Storage Access API policy, users might lose offline capability and see slower performance.
Admins need to configure a browser policy (via Intune or Group Policy) to allow OneDrive and SharePoint to keep working smoothly.
Timeline:
Action needed before early 2026
5. Copilot Integration with Microsoft Lists
Microsoft now allows SharePoint Lists to be used as a knowledge source for Copilot. This means you can ground Copilot prompts in list data, making it easier to query, summarize, and act on structured information without manually searching through lists.
Context IQ is the AI layer that powers this experience. It helps Copilot understand your context and suggest relevant files, people, and lists when you type / in a prompt.
This integration enables faster decision-making with AI-driven summaries and insights. Great for project managers, support teams, and anyone who uses Lists as a lightweight database.
Read more about Copilot and Context IQ
Timeline:
General Availability – January 2026
6. Automation Enhancements with Power Automate
Microsoft is aligning SharePoint and Lists automation with the Teams experience. The new Workflows experience uses Power Automate under the hood but offers a simplified UI, natural language automation creation with Copilot, and a unified menu for Lists, SharePoint, and Teams.
You can now describe what you want in plain language, and Copilot will build the automation for you. This reduces the learning curve and makes automation accessible to non-technical users.
Read more about the new Workflows experience
Timeline:
Rollout started September 2025
General Availability by November 2025
Bottom Line
- Mobile app? Gone in November—start using the browser version now.
- Power BI quick integration? Retiring by December—plan your reporting strategy.
- SPFx Field Customizers? Still alive 🙂
- Browser policy? Configure it now to avoid breaking offline and performance features.
- Copilot + Lists? A game-changer for productivity.
- Automation with Copilot? Makes workflows easier than ever.
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