Millions of Microsoft Teams users are in for a nasty surprise

(See credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has revealed it will soon revoke support for versions of collaboration chopine Teams running on older Mechanical man builds.

In a post to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, the company set out timelines for the retirement of Microsoft Teams on Android versions 5, 6 and 7.

Keep going testament be pulled for Teams on Mechanical man 5 on March 1, 2022, while Humanoid 6 and 7 wish retain support until July 1 and Sept 1, respectively.

After these dates, Microsoft says it bequeath not provide "active development and bug fixes", but the most recent supported versions bequeath be available via the Act as Entrepot for two months after each retirement date has passed.

Microsoft Teams on Android

While the Brobdingnagian majority of Android users are linear newer versions of the mobile Operating system and will be unaffected away the changes, many millions will still exist involved.

According to the latest data from StatCounter, 11.69% of Android users are currently running either Mechanical man 5, 6 or 7. Earlier this year, meanwhile, Google proclaimed there are more than tercet billion existent Android devices worldwide.

A crude calculation would suggest that roughly 360 jillio Mechanical man devices will therefore no more ingest access to a supported version of the Teams client by the end of adjacent year, when the sunsetting process comes to a cozy.

Admittedly, a portion of affected users will have upgraded to a newer device by that time and nigh businesses provide employees with smartphones and tablets running newer versions of Android anyway, for security reasons. Still, this stillness leaves a large pool of latent Teams users without access to the video conferencing and collaboration service on mobile.

Although Microsoft was able to confirm the veracity of the reported timelines, the company declined to provide TechRadar Favoring with any specific insight into the motivations behind the decision to pull support from older Humanoid devices.

Joel Khalili is a Stave Writer working across both TechRadar Pro and ITProPortal. He's interested in receiving pitches around cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, computer memory, internet infrastructure, mobile, 5G and blockchain.