What Happened to the Mendeley Mobile App?
Mendeley retired its mobile app on March 15, 2021. What was announced, what it changed for people who read on a tablet, and what the options are in 2026.
Mendeley's mobile app was retired on March 15, 2021. It was removed from the App Store and Google Play on that date, signing in to it stopped working, and Mendeley has not announced a replacement since.
This article covers what was announced, what it changed for people who used it, and what Mendeley users do instead in 2026.
Does Mendeley Have a Mobile App in 2026?
No. There is no official Mendeley app for iPhone, iPad or Android. What Mendeley offers today is Mendeley Reference Manager, which runs on the desktop and in a browser, along with Mendeley Cite and the Mendeley Web Importer.
A browser on a tablet will open your library, so your references are reachable. The app that put them on the device is what went away.
What Mendeley Announced
Users of the mobile app were notified on February 10, 2021 that it would be withdrawn the following month. On March 15, 2021 the app was taken off the App Store and Google Play, and sign-in was disabled. People were asked to sync their library to the cloud before that date, so that anything held only on a phone or tablet would not be stranded, and to use Mendeley Reference Manager — desktop or web — from then on.
The announcement is still on the Mendeley blog.
What Changed in Practice
The library itself was never the issue. It lives in the cloud, and it was still there on March
- What changed was the set of things that only a native app could do.
Reading away from a desk. A tablet stops being a reading device for your library and becomes a browser pointed at it. That is a real difference once a paper runs past a few pages.
Reading without a connection. A web library needs a network. Papers on a train, on a plane, or in a building with bad reception have to be downloaded by hand first.
Adding papers on the go. A PDF that arrives on a phone or tablet has nowhere to go until you are back at the computer where your library lives.
None of these break anything. They just move work that the app used to absorb back onto the person doing the reading.
Why the Gap Stayed Open
The obvious expectation would be that a third-party app filled the space. One did exist — PaperShip, which connects to Mendeley and Zotero libraries on iPhone, iPad and Mac — and it is still listed on the App Store today.
What its listing also shows is the version history: the most recent release, 3.8.5, is from November 2019, more than a year before Mendeley's own app was withdrawn.
That is the shape of the gap. An app in this category has to keep up with a reference manager's API on one side and a mobile operating system that changes every year on the other. When neither the official app nor the third-party one is being updated, the workaround stops being a workaround — not through any single event, but by standing still.
What Mendeley Users Do Now
In practice there are three routes: read in the browser, download PDFs into a separate reader app, or use an app that connects to your Mendeley account directly. Each one trades away something different — offline access, annotation, or the bookkeeping of moving files around by hand.
The full comparison, including what each option costs you in practice, is in How to Read Mendeley Papers on iPad in 2026.
Where Rectoly Fits
Rectoly is an app for iPad and iPhone that signs in to your Mendeley account and opens your library in a reader built for reading — Apple Pencil annotation, two papers side by side, offline once synced. Highlights, notes and sticky notes move in both directions between the iPad and Mendeley.
It is not a reference manager and is not trying to become one. Your library stays in Mendeley.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I still sign in to the old Mendeley mobile app?
No. Sign-in was disabled when the app was withdrawn on March 15, 2021, so an old copy still installed on a device cannot reach your library.
Was my Mendeley library affected when the app was retired?
No. Libraries sync to Mendeley's cloud, and the retirement did not remove anything from them. The reason users were asked to sync before March 15 was to cover anything that existed only on the phone or tablet and had not been uploaded yet.
Is Mendeley Reference Manager still supported?
Yes — it is the current Mendeley application, on the desktop and in a browser. The older Mendeley Desktop program is a separate thing: Elsevier has said that no further software updates will be released for it and that its compatibility with future operating systems cannot be guaranteed.
Will Mendeley release a new mobile app?
Nothing has been announced. Anything beyond that would be speculation.
Conclusion
The mobile app is not coming back, but the thing people actually lost was smaller and more specific than "Mendeley on mobile": a way to read papers from their own library, on the device they read on, without turning every paper into a file transfer.
That is the part worth rebuilding, and it does not require leaving Mendeley to do it.