Microsoft is killing Skype (opens in new tab)

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools.

The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime and other services, especially by older people.

Tangential: I have a U.S. Skype Number (i.e., a real phone number offered by the Skype service) that's mainly used to receive and make (occasional) calls from/to a bank and to receive SMS occasionally. The cost is about $40 a year. With Skype Number not available for purchase since December and the Skype platform (including Skype Number) going away soon, what are some simple, good (and preferably cheaper) alternatives for a VoIP service that works on an iPhone? I do not have any (other) real phone number in the U.S. I guess my current Skype Number cannot be ported or moved to another service.

Are there any alternatives to get a real U.S. phone number that will work in another country for long periods (AFAIK, many providers require the phone to connect to a local cellular network periodically)?

Edit: In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not physically in the U.S.

Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother.

Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely.

No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.

Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag.

The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.

Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents computer before moving abroad, their user experience was basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and we'd be video chatting.

A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no application for desktop that was as simple as receiving a phone call. My father has no smart phone. I sent him a zoom link via email but he couldn't log on to the family computer without getting blasted with UI updates, terms of service changes, "Do you want to use OneDrive?", "Here's what's new in Chrome", "Try asking Copilot anything!", etc. From his perspective the computer never worked the same way twice. I wish we had regulations that prevented buying out competition.

Skype got me through my first few years living in a different country from my family/friends/girlfriend/enployer.

There was a time when whole companies were on Skype the way they're now on Slack.

It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.

I put $10 on an account over ten years ago to make sporadic calls (e.g. customer service in other countries). That account still has $5 left, and I’ve made a ton of calls to many different countries.

What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.

It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. They already had everyone and everything in place! But the app is a buggy mess, far worse than Teams, and they just refused to do anything about it.

I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?

Microsoft killed Skype for me a few months ago: the Linux version simply stopped working, and unless I install a Snap-based one (which I cannot do remotely on family computers), it's now useless.

Also, my Skype credit simply disappeared from the account (granted, it had been sitting idle for a few years, but still).

WhatsApp, Signal and similar apps completely replaced Skype, which stopped innovating years ago. Other than some "automatic captioning" based on Bing, and interface changes that are annoying for computer-illiterate people, barely anything changed.

For several years, Skype had been a very lightweight way to communicate with people with not-so-good computers and flaky Internet connection. Trying to replace it with Jitsi, for instance, quickly shows how much more CPU is needed to run that instead. But then the Linux version started being packaged differently (Electron?), so that was lost as well.

Well, it will likely survive for some time on old companies that still use Skype for Business.

Anyone knows of an alternative to Skype to make free calls to 1-800 numbers? I was keeping Skype in my back pocket during trips abroad for that exact reason (allowed me to get away with using data only eSIMs and still be able to call bank/airline if something happens).

Skype (the original product/service, before Microsoft's corporate hug of death) was an amazing piece of technology.

It was pre-cloud in every aspect, not only using P2P for actual VoIP traffic but also for contact list management and node discovery (via DHT and promoting random people's PCs to act as core nodes! Opening up Wireshark on my laptop when on fast university Wi-Fi with a public, unfirewalled IP was quite the experience).

It was also available literally everywhere: Linux, the Sony PSP, Nokia's Linux-based "internet appliance/tablet" series, Symbian smartphones, cordless landline phones in some countries...

I've long since moved on, but I do have some very fond memories of it being a lifeline to friends and family when backpacking and studying abroad in a time of horrendously expensive international/roaming calls.

Rest in peace!

End of an era, but the writing was on the wall.

I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.

Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.

if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.

When Microsoft acquired Skype (the company), it was clear they would kill it. Skype had previously been bought by eBay, for which it served the purpose of entering a new market. Then, it was bought by some investment funds, for which it served the purpose of making money. However, to Microsoft, which already had its Windows/Live messenger (which copied Skype’s homework anyway), Skype served no purpose except to remove a competitor. They did not have a reason to develop it.

I’m surprised, in some ways, that it took almost 15 years for it to die. If Microsoft absorbed the Skype tech in 1 year and rebranded/reskinned Live Messenger to look like Skype, they could have been done with it in 2012.

Now, they are retiring Live Messenger and Skype. Two technologies have become zero. It is interesting that they chose to go this way.

How will I check if my mic is working now?

It's valid to think of this as Microsoft sort of squandering a unique opportunity to become the ubiquitous video conferencing standard by not investing in Skype, back when it had a market-leading position. Another way to look at this is that even though they bungled this, they still managed to become that solution through Teams. Even though they failed to compete with Skype, got leapfrogged by Slack, and then again by Zoom, they still manage to come out on top, at least in corporate America.

You can argue that they could have been Zoom, too, but looking at Zoom's 22bn market capitalization I don't think Microsoft sheds many tears about that thought. It's more a testament to the incredible market power and distribution muscle Microsoft has, that they can afford this many bad decisions and still win in a way.

Teams is a heavyweight behemoth with awful UX while Skype orginally had a very lightweight feel to it. Of course, Microsoft had to kill that through various UI "improvements".

Also, Skype has an official Linux client.

Instead of developing Teams (NIH at its best), they could have carefully developed Skype into a similar platform. But I'm not sure a giant like Microsoft is capable of something like this. But at least their 8.5bn investment wouldn't have been just to kill a competitor.

Every time I'm forced to use Teams it's a chore. I was trying to find a way to set a virtual background or change camera settings, and it looks like it's only available right before you join a meeting. It's wild.

I feel like I’m one of the few people still using Skype. I’m using the feature where you can rent an international local phone number and people can call you on that number and it forwards to your phone (my family live abroad).

I’ve been looking and I’m struggling to find services with this feature that aren’t 3x+ the price. Skype seems to be unique in that it’s aimed at consumers and most of those other services seem to be aimed at businesses (that could be a factor in why it failed).

Can anyone make any recommendations?

Absolutely wild that the entire world got locked inside their homes and everybody became a remote worker and that wasn't enough for Skype or Teams to get used. Embarrassing! and this is the end result.

WhatsApp is now the de-facto planetary telephone network. The only problem is that it can't call landlines unlike Skype. Is there a replacement for this specific functionality?

Microsoft help pages claiming that they will not refund your unused credits if your card has expired or details changed. So Microsoft effectively is taking all the users credit for themselves. Filing a complain with the appropriate EU regulator on this as debit/credit cards expire regularly and that's just an excuse for Microsoft to take your funds.

Oh, that will be hard for my grandparents and some overseas family members. Someone managed to teach them Skype at great effort some years ago and it's still the main they use for video calling to see their grandkids. Probably will need to try teach them Google Meet or something instead, but they're not the most receptive to new tech.

>Microsoft will honor existing Skype credits, but it will no longer offer new customers access to paid Skype features that allow you to make or receive international and domestic calls.

This sucks for me; I used Skype for this regularly for dealing with paperwork/banks/etc back in my home country.

What do people use instead?

I know there's probably a bajillion of fly-by-night operations that offer this, but given that whenever I have to use an actual _phone_, I'm probably dealing with a bank, the tax office or some other governmental entity — I'd prefer something where I'm not worried about my calls being intercepted.

The verb "to skype" means "to video chat with someone" to many many people, in the same way "to google" means to look something up online.

I don't even use skype, yet I say "I skyped my grandma on Sunday" and similar, using any number of other apps. It'll be a hard habit to break.

I'm surprised see Microsoft buying a competitor to only then shut them down at a later date. It's not like them at all to act like a Monopoly.

My wife and I still use Skype, primarily for chat, but sometimes video calls. I had Skype Credits, but I don't really need that anymore. The service has definitely degraded (like it couldn't deliver text in a timely manner frequently), but we never switched because despite its faults, it was comfortable enough. No way in hell I am going to use that garbage Teams. I am stuck using it at work and loathe it. This motivates to find a Free Software alternative to this.

Microsoft has sent out this email:

Dear Skype user,

In order to streamline our consumer communications offerings, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025. As part of this change, we want to keep you informed about important updates to your Skype paid services and how these changes may affect you. Please read on for detailed information about the updates and what they mean for your services. Subscriptions & Automatic Top-Ups: Existing subscriptions will continue to automatically renew until April 3, 2025. After this, all subscriptions will be retired and no longer be available for purchase, renewal, or reactivation. Automatic top-ups will end on April 3, 2025.

Skype Number: Your Skype Number subscription will continue to automatically renew until April 3, 2025 and will remain active until the end of your next renewal period. To port your Skype Number, please contact your new provider directly. Learn more

Skype Manager: Skype Manager users can purchase and renew paid products, including automatic credit top-ups, until April 3, 2025. After this date, only existing credit balances can be allocated to group members for calling.

For SMS services: SMS services will be discontinued on May 5, 2025.

Skype Dial Pad: After May 5, 2025, the Skype Dial Pad will be available to remaining paid users from the Skype web portal and Teams, where you will continue to be able to use your subscription or Skype Credits.

Terms of Use: Skype paid products are subject to the Microsoft Services Agreement.

Thank you for being part of Skype

We want to express our deepest gratitude for your support over the years. Skype has been an integral part of countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of your journey. Learn more about Skype retirement here.

With gratitude, The Skype Team

Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture seemed like an interesting idea. I mean that’s the sort of thing the internet was supposed to facilitate, distributed communications.

Of course MS screwed it up pretty quickly after buying it, and the name has been a mockery of it’s former potential for much longer than it was an actual thing.

RIP Skype, we never met you.

Well, that sucks.

I still use Skype whenever I’m calling internationally to my mother’s land line. I still have $9 in credits.

Skype is also a life saver when you’re abroad and need to call a US 1-800 number.

MS was always going to kill Skype once they purchased it. One way or another.

I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it but I'm not sure whether it had to do with moving to centralised servers or if it had been moved from P2P long before.

I can still hear the ringtone.

That's unfortunate, I was still using as a cheaper option for international calls to landlines.

Is there any good EU alternative for this specifically ?

Isn’t Teams running on Skype at least in some part ? I noticed that sometimes teams urls or copied data from Teams contain Skype word.

I agree that it’s not surprising, but I’d suspect that the name and a lot of the infrastructure will remain in various places. As others in the thread have pointed out, Teams appears to use a lot of Skype’s architecture.

GroupMe is also still listed on the App Store with Skype as the developer, though their website lists Microsoft as the developer instead. GroupMe has seen recent feature updates, so I’d suspect it would be mostly unaffected. Interestingly enough, GroupMe still has a public API [1], so in that sense it is more open than Skype is these days.

Also of note is that the Microsoft Account sign-in screen still accepts legacy Skype names as an alternative for an email address or phone number. It would be interesting if the ability to log into Microsoft Accounts this way outlives Skype itself.

[1]: https://dev.groupme.com/

You can really tell they abandoned it by the lack of references to Copilot on the website.

This makes me wonder, are my old chats still around? Is there any tool to back them up? Skype played a major role in my life for a good while, which I'd want to preserve.

When did "consumer" become a word used by marketing? It's a technical term from economics and a role that is played by everyone at various points in their lives. Calling people "consumers" seems distasteful and I think betrays how Microsoft thinks about their customers. "Teams for Home" would have been a much more obvious and nice name.

Teams for consumers / home / whatever they're calling it doesn't even support audio calls or video calls (not even 1:1). It can literally only do text chats.

I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing here, except admitting they don't care at all about the consumer market (except to advertise to / data mine).

I just deleted it from my phone, yesterday. I haven't actively used it in I don't know how many years; maybe briefly last year when traveling o/s and needing to make a landline call to a number back home, but other than that, pretty much no use for years, and lately all I've been getting was crypto spam group chats.

I remember how amazing it seemed when I was doing the "digital nomad" thing in the mid-late 00s, using Skype to redirect my landline number from home to my mobile (some Nokia thing, whatever was the best one for 20-somethings in 2006) with a local SIM as I caught buses around Thailand and Vietnam. It seemed so futuristic and exciting to be able to break free of the constraints of being stuck in one place - to travel around exotic places but still be connected to your work and contacts at home.

That said, most of the calls I received on that trip were telemarketing nuisance calls, so, as always, the reality didn't quite live up to the fantasy. Still, looking back it feels like it was a more optimistic and wondrous time.

Unfortunately, Skype was an easy way for people to easily call toll-free US and Canadian numbers while overseas for free.

(E.g. need to call an American airline or rental car company while abroad).

Sometimes the local numbers would cost you money to call (or were only available during business hours and in the middle of the night for you, it may be daytime hours in North America).

I'm still using it after starting on one of the early Skype versions. At over 20 years, it's lasted me longer than ICQ, IRC or an other messenger. Most of my contacts no longer use Skype but it's the primary way I contact my family and I can't think of an obvious replacement that would fully satisfy my use case.

"Teams for Consumers" The product name already is an omen on how "successful" this will be.

Lots of good times on Skype in high school. Plenty of 12 hour calls on that service for free, and I really appreciate that it was a thing. It was really solid for the time. We had so much fun buying $10 of Skype credit when we finally were old enough to get jobs and then prank calling people over Skype. Very juvenile, but that's what we were.

Thankfully, P2P calling and video calling in general is a solved problem now with web standards included. I'm glad Skype was there when it was.

I just used Skype the other day. I still find it useful for certain things. Is it that these companies can't maintain a piece of software unless they see a way for it to grow and dominate the world?

Looks like this is the address to export your chat history:

https://go.skype.com/export

They bought it to murder anyway. Consciously or cluelessly, does not matter to me. It was so sad seeing it becoming that useless piece of junk not resembling the Skype grew to be the centerpiece and workhorse of my communications, business and personal alike in its prime time. I was mad about this incompetent giant ruining it little by little, sometimes with a big hit to its stomach. RIP Skype, years and years ago. Only nostalgy left it on my desktop, and two (one plus one) rare contacts. Everything dies, then rots away slowly, it was painful to see that for Skype it happened not in this order.

I just installed Skype this week to talk to someone using Skype's translation feature. And it mostly worked okay too. Any recommendations for other products that can do real time translation decently well for free?

Related, I've found it difficult to also find a good phone app for handling in person interaction. Google translate is awkward to use with its requirement to specify the direction of the language and being geared towards shorter phrases rather than an entire continuous conversation.

This is a response to search query of a related topic (I know it doesn't directly address the topic of the posting).

Cisco has a reputation for sometimes "killing" companies it acquires by discontinuing successful products from those companies after integrating them, most notably exemplified by the case of the "Flip" video camera, which Cisco purchased and then quickly shut down despite its popularity, often citing strategic alignment with their core networking business as the reason for such decisions; this practice has led to criticism of Cisco's acquisition strategy, where some argue they prioritize short-term financial gains over the long-term potential of acquired companies and their products.

This is such great news. I had to communicate with clients and in some European countries Skype is expected. It's used for group instant messaging and it is awful compared to Slack/Teams. These users absolutely refuse to move off it so glad to hear they will have no choice. Skype sucked 10 years ago. With the vast array of better options available it sucks immeasurably more now.

If true this will be another “we lost the browser war” “we underestimated mobile” story, and they will realize it only 10 years from now.

Feels like Google never built anything successful themselves after the Search engine (maybe GMail), but rather bought stuff that became successful (e.g. Google Maps).

Conversely, Microsoft has built successful products (Windows, Office, ...), but it feels like whenever they buy something, they break it. Remember Nokia?

That's probably wrong, but it's how it feels to me now :).

This reminds me of how Yahoo Messenger was silently a significant part of the oil trade, and its shutdown may have subtly made the industry more opaque: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepa...

I have no doubt that we'll see stories about niche industries still built on the backs of Skype that are scrambling to adapt. Nowadays, I suppose it's likely a rounding error compared to other ways that geopolitical forces are disrupting various industries... but we should all be aware of the implicit commitment we make to users when releasing any B2C service, and how people will build entire livelihoods around the simplest of services in ways we can't anticipate.

Skype was great, until M$ bought it, and then it was all downhill. For some reason they removed the ability to have a personalised answerphone message. Why?

Any suggestions for an equivalent VOIP service? Something simple and cheap so I can have a phone number on my website that rings on my computer + has an answerphone for missed calls.

I don't understand why killing a "brand" you own is so important. Just repackage the existing product you mean to keep around and call it something else. How many other industries are ruled by rebranded bullshit that does what they used to and now overcharge by factor X?

Stop killing, make zombies work.

Teams has never been as good as Skype at calls, even in the very early days.

I was shocked at how good Skype was when my son called a friend in a French village where he was an exchange student. The quality rivaled the best local calls on a landline.

Teams still feels disjointed and awkward, is slow as hell, and manages to make the simplest tasks (adjusting volume) incredibly difficult.

I am still lowkey mad about how Microsoft handled Skype. They acquired a great piece of tech that was widely popular and used and they straight up butchered it. I was unable to fathom why version 7.2 dropped lists, when up at this point I was able to create lists of my contacts. I could not understand why when searching for someone using their name, the search results would show me people from other countries sharing a same name before showing me the person from my contact list. They bought it to degrade it and then destroy it, so that they could push for Teams. It worked, but from a consumer's perspective that was just disheartening.

I still use Skype to do international calls to my bank/tax office/government agencies when I am overseas. It's been indispensable, though their new model of buying a subscription rather than just having phone credits sucks

Long time coming. The only one in my social group who still used it was my wife - and just for the function to call regular phones. Calling family in the US/MX from EU was pretty cheap with the Skype credit option.

Thats it. Public companies only think about their shares price and KPI. Only private/startup companies can build nice piece of software and have good product. Enterprise can only be fat and ugly

Over a week ago, I was trying to top-up my Skype Credits but I can't find that option anymore. Then I saw this news. It's their product, it's their decision, but I just want to say, it used to be a really good product. Skype brings a lot of good memories of the early days of online work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsUyjzRIU9w - play it, thank me later.

It lost all hope when it demanded the same login as windows. No longer could I have a semi-annon chat tool. I didn't want a "one password for everything" experience.

Microsoft have not sent me an email about this. I still have $120 credit on Skype and a Skype-In number. Curious if they will give the credit back to me.

[Edit] My question was answered here [1].

[1] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...

Like CrossLoop yrs. Back buy it, to miss manage, then kill it...it was competition

The P2P aspect of Skype was really interesting. I remember there were even physical handsets you could buy that had Skype built-in, which I thought were cool. I remember seeing business cards with Skype username on them also. That's how popular the thing was!

It's honestly baffling how we're still relying on old PSTN/phone numbers to reach people in 2025.

I can understand this decision because even my own Skype account is a ghost town unopened for few months.

But it is really a giant asshole move to close that in only 2 months when the thing has existed for so many years and you are a big company and not bankrupt!!

You might easily be caught by surprise (as I discovered that here and not even in the app) and lose valuable old conversations or contact info.

Agonizing to see this, but not for any current love of Skype. Redesigns killed it, and so obviously at the time were going to kill it. Redesigns like this kill trust and familiarity in a product, eventually the Microsoft account upsell meant I could not even log in using my Skype username at one point. I'm a tech person, imagine a mom'n'pop suffering the same.

I remember loving Skype before Microsoft bought it. I started using it very early on. It was amazing. I remember they had something like public groups (I forget the name). Think of it like a Twitter Space. I was in there every day.

Some people might remember "his highness from India". Good times arguing and listen to others argue with him.

There's the official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...

From my experience:

Skype was pretty neat but always imperfect and throughout its history, including the Microsoft purchase, it just never could get out of its own way as a clunky piece of software.

In many ways it reminds me of the awkwardness and clumsiness of Teams, with the exception that Skype never managed to capture the enterprise market.

Is there a replacement for my use case? Essentially I have two Skype numbers in different countries, and use Skype to receive/forward calls and also to dial out from them to those countries.

It never worked great to be honest, and I don't care about losing the numbers, but I'd like the functionality.

Just a decade or so ago, 'Skype' was the 'Kleenex' of video calling. Funny how fast tech moves.

Sad to see it go.

Was looking for alternatives (maybe DIY) and found this repo: https://github.com/eric-brechemier/how-i-replaced-skype-with...

We use Skype to make long-distance calls to relatives who only have land lines. (For reasons, gifting the relative an Internet-connected device and just using FaceTime is NOT an option).

I wonder what we will use once Skype shuts down - Google voice is also not an option (they stopped wanting our money years ago).

I still have clients who run Skype for Business on premises. It feels so ancient when I have to use it.

Great. Really not looking forward to helping my grandmother migrate, and possibly a bunch of her friends.

I have been using Skype to call my parents every week for the last 15 years... and i still do. It works!

Will we ever have communication tools more durable and predictable (with known and managed failure modes and privacy expectations) than paper mail?

Standardised protocol? independent of any single entity or subscription? readable without special technology? universal service infrastructure?

It's amazing to think that there was a time when Skype was literally synonymous with web-based calls and text chat. It was a verb, like googling. First eBay (was always a terrible fit), then Microsoft (which could have made it the defacto standard), lost the plot.

Kinda hope they have a good way to migrate Skype numbers. I have one that I used sometimes when I don't want to give my real number. I have been meaning to look into alternatives. I think I can port it to some other provider, but haven't found one I liked.

New messengers are worse than old ones. You could sign up for Skype using just login and password and for modern messengers you need to provide at least a phone number, and if the trend continues tomorrow they will start requiring biometric data I assume.

When Microsoft took it over, I lost the ability to log in. Despite having many paid credits on the system. There were numerous issues like -- you couldnt log in if you already had a microsoft account under the same email in some cases.

That's kind of a shame, although the product has obviously been neglected, I still used it on mobile to make local calls over wifi while I'm travelling internationally. The app is... rough, but it gets the job done.

Literally every messaging platform Microsoft has ever created has always been terrible, and that remains true to this day. The only exception was Skype, which used to be good, but after Microsoft acquired it, it also became terrible.

It seems Microsoft is moving over from apps, desktop and mobile.

Apart from developer tools, Office, Windows and some games, it seems they killed everything.

Judging on how Windows releases seem to be degrading, I wonder if they will try to pull the plug from there, too.

Did Skype ever, like, actually work? I gave it a few chances over the years, but personally, despite living in an area with very fast broadband, it was always had quality issues. For me, Ichat and Hangouts always worked better.

I use Skype for online language classes. The good thing is that the chat window is persistent for the contact (unlike Google Meet). That means I can go back in history during a call and see the previous notes

Well this is really sucks. What other cheap and reliable real-phone calling services are there with working CallerID?

Calling to airlines, banks and other institutions is still needed and I still use Skype for this from time to time.

Just waiting for an OSS Skype clone built on alternative infrastructure such as Twilio or jitsi meet under the hood haha

Honestly though, I'll miss the 2ct/min calls to pretty much any landline in foreign countries

Been using Skype Manager to handle numbers for a few accounts in our business. I haven't found info if it will be possible to migrate these numbers to Teams. Does anyone have info about this?

Seems unwise. I'd at least try to sell it instead. It's a very popular brand still. You don't just "kill" things like that - brands are very difficult to build.

Is there a good alternative with high-bandwidth, high-quality video? I just tried Discord, Telegram, and Element - they all compress their video quite noticeably into a blurry mush.

I use Skype for cheap international phone calls so I'm looking for a replacement. I have't tried it yet but Viber looks promising.

They can open source it.

Oh man I actually use it to get a US phone number... What's a better alternative for this? I like skype cause you can request a new one every time you wanted.

I’m still bitter with Microsoft shutting down Wunderlist.

After 14 years of neglect, I still prefer it to Teams.

So the only option for ad hoc communication between groups of friends (as opposed to more formalized corporate communication) remains Discord?

I remember Skype being a big malware vector, and did my best to avoid. I do think MSFT cleaned this up, but the brand was ruined for me.

if you're looking for an immediate alternative, the State of Utopia has just bootstrapped this p2p alternative using WebRTC. It supports voice, video, and chat and has no logging, recording, or analytics of any kind:

http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html

Monopolies are holding back innovation in the US, and I think we will start seeing the affects of which in the next decade or so

You'll get nothing that works and like it!

The news is that skype wasn’t already dead

imho Skype wasn't the only huge opportunity Microsoft had to win space in the internet - and it wasn't only Messenger, but their social space they had along with it. In there you could post statuses (even with pictures!) and people could comment on those. Sound familiar...?

One thing that's really fun is getting inundated with spam from random accounts

"user sent Translation Request"

Ask HN: What app do I use for cheap international telephone calls, to actual telephone numbers, now?

Sure but since most of its components have been Frankensteined into MS Teams it lives on right?

I used it only to call landline numbers in foreign countries.

Is there any alternative today to do this?

hopefully next is Teams. Microsoft gave up building browser engine and for everyone's sanity they shall also try to stop building chat applications. Arguably Slack has its issues, but it's a world apart in terms of usability, UX, UI, etc.

How do you make phone calls then?

I really like Skype and have a ton of important contacts on it.

Everyone is pissed, in our circles at least.

I dislike Teams for ad hoc comms.

We will have to pick something..

Not looking forward to that.

SKYPE suddenly HAS TO HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER.

Getting Microsoft accounts has to be why.

Nope. We will pick something else.

Are there any reliable alternatives for international landline/mobile calls?

Microsoft killed Skype when they removed its peer to peer architecture.

/me cires in Estonian

Possibly the first good double NAT agile protocol in widespread uae

Bring back CU-SeeMe! ;)

I will miss Skype. It has a special place in my memory.

What will happen to user's existing Skype credit?

Killed Skype? Didn't it just merge into Teams?

What is the alternative to do cheap calls abroad?

I liked it when they made all the lines wiggly

Are they going to refund the existing credit?

Amazing how neglected this service was considering Microsoft paid billions. Are there companies that do acquisitions well without killing the thing they acquire?

What happened? It's kind of hard to fuck up a chat app. The Skype ring tone is iconic.

When I started my business, i needed a voip phone number and was already in Microsoft ecosystem so I went with Skype.

It was a freaking mess. And expensive on top of that.

Couldn't believe how people were paying for Skype number services.

A few years later, i can't believe how people are paying for any Microsoft service and how this company isn't already dead.

If there wasn't for the os quasi monopoly with windows that behave like a platform on top of which they can promote office software, onedrive and so on, Microsoft wouldn't be making any money with it's software. It's absolutely pathetic.

Something needs to kill Microsoft.

Microsoft killed Skype years ago.

Why not use AI to make Skype successful?

Not adding AI, but have AI design, and execute the steps to turn Skype into a successful product

I honestly didn’t even know Skype was still alive I’m surprised it’s around to kill. MS Teams is so cemented in my own any anyone I knows world that it’s funny to think back on the days where Skype was here and everyone hated it.

Microsoft first completely ruined Skype in its usual way of implementing user-hostile nonsense, forcing you to integrate with the rest of its bullshit login system to use the app, and generally making what used to be a wonderfully smooth, useful communication platform into a mostly useless mess.

This latest news is just a very outdated obituary to a long-since applied death sentence that started the day the company pointlessly bought Skype.

So they Nokia-ed Skype. RIP.

RIP longmont potion castle

It's Teams now isn't it? Some of the links generated by teams still have the word Skype in them.

perhaps they can open-source it for great good ?

What's disappointing about it to me is that Skype has been my "mobile" telephone for more than 10 years. Upstate NY has cell phone dead spots in it bigger than some European countries but go to a gas station with a tablet and Skype and it works great.

I'll take it!

Now I really hope Microsoft buys Google.

Another Ars [dupe]

I still use Skype, mainly out of habit, but I guess it's finally time to move on. Telegram seems like the best alternative for me, but I wonder—what are others switching to? Feels like every few years, we have to migrate to a new chat platform.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish"

EDIT: I got this working, here is what AI can do for you today. It's only been 54 minutes since I posted the question at the end of this comment:

http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html

It's p2p voice, video, and chat without logging. To use it send someone the link and your peer ID and they can connect to you and you can start chatting.

In those 54 minutes I got it working on Chrome, Firefox, and mobile including Safari and Chrome, fixed emojis so it worked (I had to be in the loop for that and walk it through how to fix it). There are no analytics or recording, it just works. It totals 468 lines of code.

Writeup about it:

"How we made a Skype alternative in 45 minutes (video, voice, chat)."

https://medium.com/@rviragh/how-we-made-a-skype-alternative-...

--

My original question:

Question from the State of Utopia:[1] would you like a free State-run alternative?

What you could expect if you say yes: our AI infrastructure can currently produce a total of about 1,000 lines of code, this is enough for us to get peer to peer person to person calling on mobile from a browser and Desktop, with voice, video, ephemeral chat that isn't saved at the end of the session, including emojis, and no address book, and no logging or recording or even analytics. We previously got peer to peer filesharing working with webrtc: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ it is buggy but worked for us, barely.

We probably can't get multiple people in the same conversation, it could be too difficult for our AI.

We can't build something as complicated as a browser (our attempt: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/feb2025/84toy-toy-browser-w...

So don't get your hopes up, but we could get the basic infrastructure up, barely. Would that be of any benefit to anyone today?

[1] The State of Utopia (which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com - St. of Ut. - for short) is a sovereign country with the vision of using autonomous AI that "owns itself" to give free money, goods, and services, to its citizens/beneficiaries - it is a country rather than a company because it acts in the interests of its citizens/beneficiaries rather than shareholders.

Oh no! Anyway... Signal seems fine as a replacement?