The MSN
apps provide users information from sources that publish to MSN. Microsoft launched these apps along with the 2014 redesign of the MSN web portal, rebranding many of the
Bing apps that originally shipped with
Windows 8 and
Windows Phone in 2012. News, Weather, Sports, Money, and Travel first shipped with Windows 8, while Health & Fitness and Food & Drink first appeared in
Windows 8.1. In December 2014, the apps became available across all the other major
mobile device platforms as well:
iOS,
Android, and
Fire OS. The apps have since been limited to fewer platforms. The apps allowed users a reasonable amount of freedom to decide which sources provide information. Each app has its own color code that was used on the Windows live tile and internally. Originally, each app brought a unified experience with the MSN website and synchronized preferences across devices. There are currently three apps: the MSN app, MSN Weather, and MSN Money. In July 2015, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, and Travel apps on all platforms, and that they would not be bundled with
Windows 10; those apps, and Sports, are no longer offered.
MSN app |
Android 9+ |
iOS 16+ |
web}} }} The
MSN app (on iOS and Android, alternatively named
Microsoft News on Windows) is a
news aggregator and service that features top news headlines and articles chosen by editors and automated systems. It includes news sections for top stories, U.S., world, money, technology, entertainment, opinion, sports, and crime, along with other miscellaneous stories. The app allows users to set their own personalized favorite topics and sources, receive notifications of breaking news through alerts, filter preferred news sources, and alter font sizes to make articles easier to read. Development of the initial app began in May 2012, ahead of the
Windows 8 Release Preview, and then it officially launched alongside Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. The app was originally named "Bing News" at the time of its launch in 2012, rebranded "MSN News" in 2014, again renamed "Microsoft News" in 2018, and once again relaunched as "
Microsoft Start" on iOS and Android in 2021. In November 2024, Microsoft decided to retire the "Microsoft Start" branding and bring back the "MSN" name for the app. According to
Windows Central, the company stated that this update was meant to simplify branding while keeping all existing functionalities unchanged. The app used the chaseable live tile feature introduced in the
Windows 10 Anniversary Update; if a user clicked on the Microsoft News
Start menu tile when a particular story is shown, the user would see a link to that story at the top of the app when it launches.
MSN Weather app }} The
MSN Weather app (originally named "Bing Weather") shows weather from a user's current location or any other location worldwide, and it allows users to define their favorite places, which will synchronize back to the Microsoft Start and across devices. Users can pin Weather tiles to the
Start menu to see local weather conditions from multiple locations at a glance. It also offers satellite maps and has information regarding
ski resorts. The app receives its weather conditions and
forecasts from a variety of sources internationally. Weather uses weather conditions as the background, making it the only app that does not have a light/dark switch in Windows 10. Weather is not available for iOS; however, it came preinstalled on the
Nokia 215 phone from
Microsoft Mobile that ran
Series 30+; it was the only
feature phone to have the app built-in. Throughout 2025, its features were absorbed into the MSN Android app and the Windows Web Experience Pack, a system component app part of
Windows NT responsible for Windows 11 widgets.
Other apps The
MSN Food & Drink app (originally named "Bing Food & Drink") was a
recipe app that offered news related to foods and drinks, a personal
shopping list that synchronized across devices and the web, and a
wine encyclopedia that contained information on over 1.5million
bottles of wine, over 3.3million
tasting notes, and hundreds of
cocktail recipes. Users could control the app hands-free, add their own recipes from physical
cookbooks or personal recipes by snapping a photo, add notes to recipes, and sort the recipes into collections. The app also listed information from famous
chefs according to their style of cuisine. The
MSN Health & Fitness app (originally named "Bing Health & Fitness") allowed users to track their
calorie intake, look up nutritional information for hundreds of thousands of different foods, use a built-in
GPS tracker, view step-by-step
workouts and
exercises with images and videos, check
symptoms for various health conditions, and synchronize their health data to third-party devices such as
activity trackers. MSN Health & Fitness formerly connected data with the
Microsoft HealthVault, but it started using a
Microsoft account with MSN's own
cloud service to synchronize data when it was rebranded from Bing to MSN. The app was not related to Microsoft's
Xbox Fitness or Microsoft Health (the companion app for the
Microsoft Band), despite being similar in function. The
MSN Travel app (originally named "Bing Travel") was a travel search engine that allowed users to book
hotels and
flights, aggregated travel-related news, and offered detailed information about thousands of travel destinations. Data in the app was powered by various travel websites, including
Expedia, formerly owned by Microsoft. Other features included finding information on local
restaurants, viewing pictures (including
panoramas) and historical data about destinations, and reading reviews by previous travelers. If the user was signed in,
Cortana could track flights and get hotel information through the app. MSN Travel was the only app in the suite that was exclusive to Windows. The app was discontinued in September 2015, but remained on the website for several years after that. The name "MSN Travel" was previously associated with
Farecast, an airfare prediction website that Microsoft acquired in 2008. The
MSN Sports app (originally named "Bing Sports") displayed various
sports scores and standings from hundreds of leagues around the world, as well as aggregated sports-related articles and news headlines. Sports also allowed the user to view slideshows and photo galleries, look up information about individual players and
fantasy leagues, and set and track their favorite teams by selecting various topics from the menu. It also powered various predictive features within Microsoft's
Cortana virtual assistant. It was discontinued on July 20, 2021, but remained on the website. The
MSN Esports Hub was a Bing intelligence
AI curated
web app launched for the growing
esports industry in 2020. Users could watch integrated streams from
YouTube or
Twitch. Microsoft's advanced AI called "Watch For", the algorithm originally made for Microsoft's
Mixer was an artificial intelligence that used computer vision algorithms on livestreams so that it can alert the viewer of significant moments. This algorithm was implemented in the MSN Esports Hub. Supported games included
League of Legends,
Valorant,
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,
Dota 2,
Overwatch,
Fortnite Battle Royale, ''
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, FIFA, Gears of War, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate''. The service was replaced by Start.gg.
Older mobile apps Microsoft first offered content from its MSN web portal on
mobile devices in the early 2000s, through a service called
Pocket MSN (in line with its
Pocket PC products of the era) and later renamed
MSN Mobile. The original MSN Mobile software was preloaded on many
cell phones and
PDAs, and usually provided access to legacy MSN services like blogs (
MSN Spaces), email (
Hotmail), instant messaging (
MSN Messenger), and web search (now called
Bing). Some
wireless carriers charged a premium to access it. As many former MSN properties were spun off to
Bing,
Windows Live, and other successors in the late 2000s, the
Microsoft Mobile Services division took over the development of mobile apps related to those services. In the meantime, Microsoft's MSN apps took on a more content-related focus, as did the web portal itself. Previous versions of MSN apps that were bundled with
Windows Mobile and early versions of
Windows Phone, as well as MSN apps for
Android and
iOS devices in the early 2010s, were primarily repositories for news articles found on MSN.com. Other earlier MSN mobile apps included versions of MSN Weather and MSN Money for
Windows Mobile 6.5, MSN Money Stocks, and a
men's magazine called "MSN OnIt" for
Windows Phone 7. After
Microsoft's acquisition of
Nokia's mobile phone division, Microsoft also started bundling MSN services with its
Nokia-branded feature phones, though the only supported model was the
Nokia 215. In addition to these apps, Microsoft developed a
separate set of mobile apps specifically for
MSN China. == International ==