Due to a bunch of updates for Skype, including group video chat for up to 25 people for mobile, Microsoft has decided to give its messaging app for Skype, released in 2014 and called Skype Qik, early retirement.

In a blog post the Skype team summed-up the reason to get rid of Skype Qik saying, “In 2014, we launched Skype Qik, a mobile video messaging app to help share moments with groups of friends. Since then, we have learned that many of you are already doing these things in Skype, and as a result, we migrated some of Qik’s most used features into the Skype app you already know and love.”

There really is no point in keeping the Skype Qik app as its function was to offer fast video messages, using filters and such, something similar to Snapchat. But following Skype’s recent and past updates this has made Skype Qik surplus to requirements.

And so be it, Skype Qik will be shut down on March 24^th of this year, which will be the final day you will be able to send or receive messages. If you want to save any “special” messages, Microsoft advises you do that now.

Skype Qik was actually the second incarnation of the app, which was first just called Qik and bought by Microsoft in January 2011 for $150 million. This was only a few months before Microsoft had paid $8.5 billion in its Skype acquisition. As Skype quickly had its own video messaging features Skype Qik really didn’t have a stand-out capability, and was a little lost as a product – especially when Microsoft also added filters to Skype in October 2015.

For this reason and perhaps more, Skype Qik not surprisingly suffered from a lack of popularity. If you go to Google Play you’ll find that it was downloaded somewhere between 1-5 million times, which is about 100 times fewer installs than the Snapchat app for Android.

Photo credit: Ged Carroll via Flickr