This week, Microsoft made a rather unfortunate announcement regarding its popular business apps for Windows Phone. Microsoft’s own business apps such as Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business and Yammer will completely stop working on Windows Phone. These apps will not be available in the Microsoft Store from May 20 of this year.
Initially, Microsoft said in their support page that even though the Business apps such as Teams, Yammer and Skype for Business will be removed from the Microsoft Store for Windows Phone users, they will still be able to use these apps from the Edge browser on their Windows Phone. But Microsoft has now removed that sentence from their support page and the reason is simple.
Microsoft Teams will not work even in the Edge browser for Windows 10 Mobile
Microsoft says that Skype for Business and Yammer apps may continue to work but they cant provide any guarantee to that statement. These apps will no longer receive any updates from Microsoft.
Microsoft Teams app, on the other hand, will stop working completely and the Office 365 users will get an error message when they try to connect. This means that both the app and the web app will stop working. It is not clear as to why only Microsoft Teams gets this fate. Even if updates aren’t given, just keeping the app available would have been enough for most users.
Microsoft explains that they will support Windows 10 Mobile but will not provide new features to the operating system. “We will continue to invest in the Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer mobile apps for iOS and Android, and also in desktop apps for Windows and Mac.”
The Redmond company also provided an obvious solution to this issue on their Support page. Microsoft will continue to invest in all these applications for Android, iOS, Windows PC and Mac so users will have to move to any of these platforms to continue using Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. As for users of Yammer, they can still use it in their mobile browser.
Microsoft may have a good reason to do this to Windows Phone but the users will not take it in a good way. Once a company loses the trust of its users, it is very hard to get it back. Going by these policies, it is difficult for Microsoft to come back to mobile even if they want to.