Skype drops support for Windows Phone and old versions of Android

Skype has been slowly transitioning from a P2P service to the cloud over the past few years, and Microsoft is unveiling some changes today to the Skype apps it supports as a result. While Microsoft will continue to support Skype on iOS 8, Android 4.03, and Windows 10 Mobile, any users stuck on Windows Phone 8 or older versions of Android will no longer receive access to the latest versions of Skype. That will render some of the apps useless over time as the Skype service evolves.

In a blog post outlining the changes, Microsoft’s Skype chief Gurdeep Pall admits that Skype has experienced some issues over the past couple of years. “At times, unforeseen issues have cropped up, like messages not syncing across devices, or delayed notifications,” says Pall. “Knowing the impact of these issues for our users, we fix these issues as quickly as we can.” The Verge outlined a number of problems with Skype recently, and Microsoft appears to blame the transition from P2P to cloud-based servers for some of the troubles. That transition isn’t complete just yet, but Microsoft says it hopes to complete this big change to the backend of Skype in the “coming months.”