Gear News of the Week: Skype Will Close for Good in May

Pour out a little liquor. Microsoft has announced that Skype, the popular video-calling app of the early 2010s, will finally be laid to rest on May 5.

Microsoft acquired the app in 2011 for a staggering $8.5 billion—some 40 percent higher than its internal valuation and the largest acquisition by Microsoft at the time. Some quick math by WIRED editor Jeremy White worked out that’s a cost to the company of around $1.6 million per day since its acquisition, and it’s hard to believe such a heavy investment has really paid off.

There were good days though. In 2016, at its peak, it was estimated there were around 300 million users—but then the competition arrived thick and fast. As we turned to new tools like Slack, Zoom, Whatsapp calling, and Microsoft’s own Teams, Skype struggled to keep hold of its user base. As of 2023, the most recent data Microsoft shared put it at 36 million users worldwide.

Don’t panic if you’re one of them, the service won’t be switched off immediately. You have 10 weeks to migrate your chats and contacts over to a free version of Teams for consumers, or you can also use the app’s export tool to download your data.

For those who decide to make the move, all your Skype group chats will port over, and if you make the move before your friends do, messages sent from Teams will be delivered to Skype during the migration period. Microsoft is removing the ability to make domestic or international phone calls after May 5, though—something that was once Skype’s bread-and-butter functionality but now something better solved by other tools.

Photoshop Finally Gets a Proper App

Wait, isn’t there a Photoshop app already, we hear you cry? Yes. Well, sort of. For anyone loyal to the brand, Adobe has offered Photoshop Express Photo Editor for basic photo editing on the go for years, but it has lacked many of the more powerful features that make Photoshop, well, Photoshop. This week, Adobe finally announced a full-fat, official Photoshop app for the iPhone, (with an Android version promised as “coming soon”), and it’s much closer to what you’d expect.