SharePoint phone app will open on a personal home screen in mid-October
Reviewed by Helen Jones
Microsoft 365 Message Center post MC1480870, published 28 September 2026, says the SharePoint mobile app for iOS and Android is being rebuilt around a personalised Discover home. General availability for Worldwide, GCC, GCC High, and DoD starts in mid-October 2026 and is expected to finish in the same window. After users update the app, it opens on a redesigned home that groups files, sites, news, and updates from people they work with. Microsoft also lists easier site browsing, in-app file previews, refreshed news and search, dark mode, and faster performance. The app will show SharePoint branding, not the branding set in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Microsoft says no admin work is required and raises no compliance issues.
Until now, phone users who bothered with the SharePoint app usually started from a navigation-first layout. Intranet home sites, hub navigation, and carefully ordered news were easier to present as the front door, even if many people still ignored the app. From mid-October, the default first screen is a personal feed of files, sites, news, and people. That does not change permissions, but it does change what employees see first. Stale news, duplicate team sites, and widely shared files will compete with the intranet you actually maintain, and you cannot hide that behind admin-centre branding.
Analysis
Treat this as a trend to watch, not a settings project. Before the mid-October update, open SharePoint on a phone as a typical employee and list the three sites, news items, or files that would dominate a personal home, then clean those first.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "SharePoint phone app will open on a personal home screen in mid-October", Collab365 Spaces. 1 source referenced.