Microsoft’s cross-platform push continues with MSN apps for iOS and Android

Microsoft’s MSN apps are no longer exclusive to Windows.

The apps, which lost their Bing branding in September, are now available for iOS, Android, and Amazon devices. Out of Microsoft’s seven existing MSN apps, six of them have made the jump to other platforms.

Here’s a rundown:

• MSN News pulls in stories from major sources such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Conde Nast, and presents them in an easy-to-read format.
• MSN Weather provides detailed forecasts, breaking weather alerts and historical records.
• MSN Sports lets you track favorite teams and sports, and provides news, standings and scores from leagues around the world.
• MSN Health & Fitness provides workout tips and health news, and lets you track your diets and exercises. It also ties into the iPhone’s step counter and syncs the data with Apple’s HealthKit framework.
• MSN Food & Drink offers cooking tips and how-to videos, and lets you save favorite recipes and cocktails for future access.
• MSN Money lets you create a watchlist for stocks, mutual funds, and investment vehicles. It also includes financial news, and tools such as a mortgage calculator.

A seventh app, MSN Travel, is still limited to Windows, letting users find flights and hotels, and read suggestions on places to go. There’s no word on whether this app will eventually land on iOS and Android.

Why this matters: While none of these apps are unique on their own, they do help flesh out Microsoft’s vision of letting users easily roam across platforms. If you log in with a Microsoft account, many of the MSN apps’ features will sync online, so you can switch to another device and still have your weather locations, saved recipes and news topics intact. That alone makes them more useful than they ever were as Windows exclusives.