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After over 22 years of being in service, Skype will be finally closing down on May 5, this year. Its replacement? That’ll be Microsoft Teams, a much more business-oriented social app.
As spotted by XDA, the latest Skype preview has a single line of code saying “Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available”. Microsoft posted official confirmation in a blog entitled “The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams”.
The blog post explains how to move over to Teams and clarifies that you can export data outside of Skype or Teams, but doesn’t actually explain how. If you would like to move your data before it closes down in May, you can request a copy of conversations or files on Skype through Microsoft itself. However, this only gives the raw data, whereas moving to Microsoft Teams means you can effectively keep a conversation going.
Though the blog says Microsoft is retiring Skype, it isn’t fully clear what that means just yet. We don’t yet know if Skype users will not be able to access the app, can’t send any message on it, or just won’t be able to download it any more.
If you want to make the move to Microsoft Teams, you will be given the option in the next few days to simply sign into Teams with your Skype details, and all your data will have migrated across.
Notably, this only moves users to a free Microsoft Teams account, which allows group calling for up to 60 minutes at a time with a max of 100 participants. It also allows unlimited chatting, 5 GB of cloud storage, and data encryption for files sent. If you want to do group calls of more than an hour, you will have to bump that up to a paid account—something you didn’t have to pay for on Skype.
Microsoft Teams is much more businesslike than Skype and caters to a different audience than Skype traditionally. However, I myself haven’t used Skype in quite some time. With the explosion in popularity of video calling services like Zoom in the last few years, and the wider migration to social spaces like Discord, I can’t say I’ll really miss the app.
However, one thing I will miss somewhat is the ringer noise. Ubiquitous with the app, signing into Microsoft Teams with your Skype account will move conversations and people across but won’t bring across that iconic sound. The Microsoft Teams ringer is similar to the Skype one, but not quite the same. Annoyingly, you can actually change the call sound on Microsoft Teams (though not to the original Skype call sound), but only if you have a paid account.
So long, Skype, and thanks for the memories.
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Kurt Indovina
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