There are currently two versions of Skype for Windows 8.1. One is the traditional desktop Skype app, known and loved (?) by millions around the world. The other is the modern-style app for the Metro environment. At the moment, the modern app is, like all other Metro apps, only usable in the full-screen Metro environment, though Windows 10 will free Metro apps from this constraint, letting them run in windows on the desktop.
But this situation is not going to continue. Microsoft is going to kill off one of the Skype apps. Naively, one might think that this would be the desktop app. The Metro app is, after all, built on the same technologies that are used for Universal Windows Apps—apps that can run on the desktop, on the phone, on the tablet, on the HoloLens, on the Surface Hub, and on the Xbox One.
This is the kind of application that Microsoft is heavily promoting to third-party developers. But it's apparently not the kind of application that the Skype team is interested in. What they announced today is not that they're killing off the desktop application, but rather the Metro one. From July 7, the Metro app will prompt users to install the desktop app, unless they're running the Metro app on Windows RT, in which case nothing changes for them.
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