Skype For Windows Phone Will Stop Working in 2017 (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson, writing for BetaNews: With the release of Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft's support for Windows Phone is gradually starting to die off. We already knew that Windows Phone support for Skype was coming to an end, but now we know more. Microsoft has now announced that as well as ending support for Skype on Windows Phone in October, come 'early 2017' the apps will simply stop working. And it's all thanks to a move to the cloud. The company has already said that the future of Skype is cloud-based rather than peer-to-peer, and this is the reason Windows Phone support is coming to a complete stop. Considering the amount of investment Microsoft has put into Skype, the decision to kill the app entirely is perhaps a little strange, but legacy support -- particularly for such a niche handset -- does not come cheap.

Comments

Re:Mindshare

[Blaskowicz]

There were x86 set top boxes five years ago (Atom), and there were x86 phones too, until Intel exited the market altogether (after nvidia did the same).
So in fact, you can get an Android x86 tablet, same hardware as lowest end x86 Windows tablets ; you could get an Android x86 phone, but won't be able to anymore, and there never were x86 Windows phone.

Re: Mindshare

[Shoten]

This means a new phone too.

And all of this is different from old iPhones, old Android phones, old Blackberry phones...how?

I would grant that Apple actually does a decent job of supporting older hardware, especially as they build new features into IOS that rely upon the newer hardware. You can buy an iPhone 5s today, and it'll run the latest version (at this moment, 9.3.4) of IOS. Android...less so, but that's probably as much to blame on the (numerous and non-coordinated) hardware vendors as anyone else. But then again, aren't all the Windows Phone handsets made by companies like HTC as well?

Let's remember that Windows Phone 8.1...the newest version being discussed here...is 4 years old. It's from 2012. Many of the best apps for IOS wouldn't work on an IOS version that's that old. And yes, Microsoft was very delayed in coming out with a new OS...but still, I get why they don't want to have to support something that old, and which, as others have pointed out, only a very tiny population ever used in the first place.