Microsoft quietly announced this week that it would retire its Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business and Yammer Windows Phone apps next month, and the news came as a blow for some Office 365 users. The announcement is actually very bad news for Windows Phone / Microsoft Teams users as the service won’t be available at all on Windows phones after May 20.
In the original version of the support page, Microsoft wrote that “Moving forward, Windows Phone users will have the best experience by using Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer in the mobile web browser.” The sentence has since been removed from the article, and for a good reason: Microsoft Teams doesn’t work on Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 Mobile, and it’s the same for Skype for Business.
To be clear, Microsoft said that the Yammer and Skype for Business Windows Phone apps may continue to work after May 20, though Microsoft Teams won’t and will display error messages when Office 365 users try to connect. Microsoft didn’t explain why the Teams app is getting a special treatment, as it would have been acceptable to keep it alive though in an unsupported state.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft to get an explanation, and we’ll update this post if we hear anything new. If you really need to have access to Microsoft Teams on the go though, it seems that you won’t have another choice than moving to iOS and Android after May 20.
Thanks Ian for the tip!
