Skype

Skype needs a different kind of review from the rest of this directory, because it is no longer a product you can sign up for: Microsoft's own support page states that Skype was retired on May 5, 2025. The address skype.com now redirects to a Teams sign-up page, the Google Play and App Store listings return 404, and the surviving Microsoft Store page carries the retirement notice where its description used to be. The one piece still answering is a web dial pad for accounts holding leftover credit or a subscription bought before the cut-off, and Microsoft has set dates after which the service's stored data is deleted.

What Skype was: a consumer calling and messaging service that ran on phones, tablets, PCs and Macs, offering one-to-one and group video or voice calls that its store listing said could hold up to 100 people, file transfers of up to 300MB, screen sharing and paid calls to ordinary phone numbers. Its wind-down was documented in unusual detail, with sales stopped when the retirement was announced in February 2025, renewals running until early April of that year, the service itself retired on May 5, and the paid extras switched off on their own schedule, including Caller ID ending in February 2026 and Skype Number subscriptions ending in May 2026. Data deletion began in April 2026 and export requests were accepted until June 15, 2026, after which Microsoft said the data would be completely deleted. For anyone still holding credit, the dial pad at the old calling address is the only working surface, and it sits behind a sign-in. The migration path Microsoft offered was to Teams, which it said would carry contacts and chats across without a new account.

The app was free and the paid layer was telephony: credit for calls to phones, subscriptions for unlimited calling to particular countries, and Skype Numbers that let people call a landline-style number that rang in Skype. None of that is purchasable now, and no current pricing is published anywhere, since the rates page is one of the addresses that redirects to Teams. The Microsoft Store listing still shows the app as free, which is true in the narrow sense that nothing is charged for a download that leads to a retirement notice.

A retired service has little left to be unsafe, and the honest summary is what Microsoft still publishes rather than what it used to. The surviving legal page carries a fair usage policy, with limits on the type, duration or volume of calls and messages, and a heading about limited emergency calling, which flagged that the service did not connect to emergency numbers the way a phone line does. An age requirement is not published, because the store listing's rating is a content rating rather than an age gate and the terms refer only to the age of majority. Encryption is the notable absence, since Skype's old encryption explainer now redirects to the retirement notice, so there is no current claim to quote and none should be assumed.

Nobody new, which is the first thing to say: the service is closed to sign-ups and its apps are gone from the app stores, so this page is for people who once used it and want to know what happened. For them the practical answers are the two dates that still matter, with data deletion under way since April 2026 and export requests accepted until June 15, 2026. Anyone who wants a working replacement is looking at the Teams page that skype.com now redirects to, or at the other calling and messaging services reviewed on this site.

A rare case of a service that ended cleanly and said so: Microsoft announced the retirement months ahead, published the dates for each piece, gave users a migration path to Teams and an export window for their data, and then turned the main domain into a redirect. The execution was orderly, and the loose ends are mostly cosmetic, in that the Microsoft Store listing still advertises a free download whose description is the retirement notice, and a dial pad still answers for accounts with credit left on them. What a reader should not expect to find is any current statement about encryption, any published age rule or a price list, because those pages either redirect or never existed. For the purposes of this directory, Skype is a historical entry now, and the useful information is the timeline.