Lenovo is giving up on its nascent Reachit app for Cortana.
The company recently sent out an email to its users announcing the service would shut down on Friday, September 12. “When we introduced Reachit, we wanted to give people the convenience of accessing all of their files from one place…we now have new priorities on Smart Devices, and as a result, we will be withdrawing Reachit,” Lenovo said in its email.
Reachit was first introduced in May 2015 during the Lenovo Tech World conference as a partnership between Lenovo and Microsoft. It then entered a public beta period, but only became available as a mainstream product in early June 2016.
The story behind the story: Although Lenovo says Reachit is going away due to a repositioning of priorities, it’s likely Cortana was already useful enough without the app. For example, you could ask a Cortana-powered REACHit to help you find the spreadsheet you were editing on Tuesday while at a local cafe. Cortana, meanwhile, could already show you what spreadsheets you were editing on Tuesday.
The one big difference is that Reachit could search across all your online accounts such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive; however, many people likely have access to those files locally and thus they are already within reach of Cortana.
Reachit also required you to give Lenovo servers quite a bit of access to information about your files, which may have put some users off.
If you’re a big Reachit user you still have a month to enjoy the service before it disappears. Anyone who always thought about trying Reachit but never bothered can still download the initial app from the Windows Store—for now.