Microsoft Is Killing Copilot Features Ahead of the "Super App"

Microsoft started merging its consumer Copilot and Copilot 365 apps into one on August 13, and along the way it's killing features that existed just a week earlier. Deep Research and Podcasts disappear entirely after August 18, Group Chat thread history doesn't carry over, and Mico, the voice-interaction mascot introduced less than a year ago, is being dropped from the core app. This still isn't the promised "Super App," just the foundation for it, but for users it means a real loss of data and features before anything new actually shows up.

What's disappearing, and when

Migration starts with a small group of Windows Insiders, then expands more broadly the following week. Global rollout on mobile and web is planned for mid-August, with Windows and Mac apps following in mid-September. After August 18, the app permanently loses: Deep Research, the feature for deeper, multi-step research queries, and Podcasts, on-demand generated audio episodes built from user prompts. Group Chat threads and messages won't survive the migration to the new version either.

On top of that, the core consumer experience is losing Mico, the colorful, expressive mascot that accompanied voice conversations, introduced less than a year ago as a way to make talking to Copilot feel more human. Mico's short life, launched and then pulled from the main app in under a year, says a lot about how fast Microsoft tests and abandons pieces of its AI assistant before they've even had time to stick.

A foundation, not the Super App itself

What's launching now is purely the unification of the consumer and business Copilot apps into one product, the technical groundwork for the actual "Super App," not the Super App itself. Satya Nadella confirmed on the July 29, 2026 earnings call that the full version will ship "this quarter," meaning by the end of September. The end product is meant to combine Copilot chat, AI coding tools, the Cowork research platform, and background agents called AutoPilot into one coherent product serving both consumers and business customers.

Unofficial leaks also point to an agent called Scout, said to act more proactively than a standard chatbot, picking a work tree, pointing to both remote environments and local repositories, and handling scheduled recurring tasks in a layer called Routines. Microsoft hasn't officially confirmed either Scout itself or the specific interface shown in the leaks, so those details are worth treating as a likely, not confirmed, direction until there's an official reveal.

The cost of moving fast, paid by the user

Merging two separate apps into one makes sense from Microsoft's side: less duplicated code, one product team instead of two, a simpler marketing story. From the perspective of someone who actually used Deep Research for real research, or had saved threads in Group Chat, it's a real loss of functionality with no guarantee it comes back in a similar form in the eventual Super App. Microsoft hasn't announced any mechanism for exporting Group Chat history before it's deleted, and with the migration rolling out within days of the announcement, users have little time to react.

It's a pattern that keeps repeating at the pace AI products move in 2026: features arrive and vanish within months, not years, and users who build habits or even real workflows on top of them regularly get left with nothing once the company decides to reorganize again. The Super App might end up a genuine improvement, but the road to it is costing current users concrete, working features today, not just a temporary inconvenience during the move.