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By Bloomberg

Microsoft Corp. is releasing new e-mail applications for smartphones and tablets that run Apple Inc.’s iOS and Google Inc.’s Android, using programs made by Acompli Inc., a startup the software maker acquired last month.

The apps retain some Acompli features, such as focusing on mobile users’ most important e-mails and enabling direct, in- message access to calendars for making appointments. They also add ways to customize swipe gestures and folders. In addition, Microsoft is releasing free touch-based versions of its Office apps for Android, two months after it began previewing them.

The e-mail and Office applications underscore a change in approach under Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, with Microsoft releasing quality versions of its apps for rival operating systems -- in some cases before the same programs are available for Windows. Microsoft showed the touch-enabled Office apps for Windows at a press event last week, though they’re not available yet.

“This is part of the ongoing Office-everywhere push that Microsoft has been championing now for almost a year,” Javier Soltero, general manager for Outlook and former CEO of Acompli, said in an interview.

The Office apps for Apple’s iPad and iPhone have been downloaded more than 80 million times, Microsoft said in a blog post. The Android Office apps preview had more than 250,000 downloads.

Amazon’s Entry

The new Outlook apps come a day after rival cloud-services provider Amazon.com Inc. said it would start a competing e-mail and calendar service for professionals, called WorkMail. Google’s Gmail service also offers a mobile app. The worldwide market for cloud-based e-mail services generated $6.32 billion in annual sales in 2014, and will increase to an estimated $17 billion by 2018, according to a report by Radicati Group Inc., a market-research firm.

“E-mail is a very challenging technology to get right,” Soltero said. “The price to entry for anything e-mail-related is very high. It’s a very habitual product and people tend to be very finicky about it. The challenges are significant for a startup, significant for Microsoft and significant for anybody else who gets into that space.”

Microsoft paid about $200 million for Acompli to gain offerings for those two operating systems, a person familiar with the deal said when it was struck. Bloomberg News reported in December that the apps would be out as early as this month.