Microsoft-owned Skype has announced that its transition from P2P to cloud is nearing completion. And so the company will be dropping support for some older versions of Android and Windows phones. The deadline set is October 2016.
To run the latest version of Skype for Android (Skype 6.2 and higher), users will need to have Android OS version 4.0.3 or above. For those running Android OS 2.3 and above, they can run Skype 4 for Android.
Also those users using Windows Phone 8 or older versions will not be able to run the latest version of Skype.
In a blog post, Skype chief chief Gurdeep Pall, said, “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.”
Claiming it to be a tough decision, he wrote, “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.”
Pall said that by focusing efforts on the devices and operating systems where the majority of our users are, the company bwill be able to better concentrate its 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,” he wrote in the post.