It was barely a year ago that Microsoft said it was giving Skype a bit of a clean up, but now it looks like the Windows company is putting the communications app to sleep. Spotted within the code of Skype for Windows preview was a message that says that it will be shut down in May.
XDA reports that the specific message reads “Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams”. A following section notes that a number “of your friends have already moved to Teams fo free”, with the specific number dependent on the individual’s account.
It’s certainly a quiet way to discontinue a service, with its announcement, if this can even be called that, be hidden in the code of a preview build. But perhaps it is not particularly surprising as it has been rendered pretty obsolete by the newer Teams.
Skype itself had quite the history prior to this point. When it was first acquired by Microsoft, one can argue that it made the company’s previous messenger app Windows Live Messenger obsolete. Originally working as a peer-to-peer service, it was changed to one that centres the company’s Azure.
(Source: XDA)
