Over the last decade, Skype has become an essential tool for people around the world. Families share special moments together, students go beyond the classroom walls to learn in new ways and colleagues get to work from virtually anywhere. We feel the privilege and the responsibility of making sure that Skype continues to serve our hundreds of millions of users, while ensuring it evolves as technology shifts.
Recently, we have been focused on transitioning Skype from peer-to-peer to a modern, mobile friendly cloud architecture. By moving to the cloud we have been able to significantly improve existing features like file sharing and video messaging, and launch new features like mobile group video calling, Skype Translator and Skype Bots to name just a few.
The transition has been ongoing for a while and isn’t complete quite yet. The team is working hard to ensure that our users can continue to use Skype smoothly throughout the transition. At times, unforeseen issues have cropped up, like messages not syncing across devices, or delayed notifications. Knowing the impact of these issues for our users, we fix these issues as quickly as we can. We do ask all our users to update Skype to ensure they benefit from our latest fixes and improvements and to enable a smooth transition to the cloud. As we transition, we are making some changes to the devices and operating systems we support:
Future device and operating system support – The pace of change in our industry means that the devices and operating systems used by the majority of people shifts with time. Our commitment to deliver the best possible cross-platform experiences requires that we continually assess when it’s time to increase our focus on the platforms of the future. Sometimes this means that we must end support for some devices and operating systems.
These decisions are hard to make, but they are necessary as Skype moves forward so we can deliver new experiences on devices that have the capability to support them. As such, we will begin to implement these changes over the coming months. You can check our support site to find out which devices and operating systems Skype will support in the future, but as an example we will continue to support Windows 7, 8, XP and Vista, Yosemite on Mac, iOS 8 and Android 4.03 operating systems.
We encourage everyone impacted to upgrade to continue using Skype and benefit from new features and improved capabilities.
Investments in core platforms and the web – By focusing our efforts on the devices and operating systems where the majority of our users are, we can concentrate our efforts on what’s most important such as call quality and new features. Our focus will be on the newly released lighter, faster and more responsive UWP app for Windows 10, Skype for iPhone, iPad and Android as well as a web-based native version of Skype for other supported platforms like previous Windows operating Systems, Mac and Linux, which will benefit from the latest ORTC or WebRTC technology that we’ve been working on for the last year.
Skype’s transition to the cloud is a huge technical endeavor, but one that is necessary and one we firmly believe in. Our users are at the core of everything we do and this transition will enable us to meet their needs in the years to come.
So much hard work has already been done and we expect it to be completed in the coming months. Thank you for your support as we continue to evolve Skype to benefit from the best that technology has to offer today and tomorrow.