Microsoft is pulling even further away from its Windows Phone devices in a few months. The company plans on dropping all support for Xbox services on all Windows Phone devices this May as support for the app and all Xbox services reach the official EOS (End of Support/Life) date. A move that cuts access to even earning achievements on any games that may still be working on the phone.
The company reached out with an announcement (notification) this month via the Xbox app to let users know of the upcoming change. A change that likely won’t affect too many people since most of you might be thinking “Wait, people still use those?”.
“Starting May 16, 2022, Xbox features will no longer be supported on Windows Phone devices. As part of this change, earning achievements will be retired on Windows Phone devices. Some games may still be playable on your phone, but progress will not be recorded to your Xbox profile.” — Microsoft’s notification via the Xbox app on Windows Phone devices
Surprisingly, there are still a number of users out there that have refused to give up their Windows Phone device. Not so surprising since the Lumia 950XL was an absolutely fantastic piece of hardware. It’s just sad that the app market never really took off and support for the phone was shuttered so early from so many directions. To this day, it does a great job living up to mode like like the Samsung Galaxy S8+ or better (hardware performance-wise).
The notifications quickly made its way online to communities like Reddit where it mostly gained reactions from users who were surprised to see the phones still offered any support at all. Support for updates ended in December of 2019, which mostly marked the end for many users, causing the market share of Windows Phone users to collapse to non-existent.
For more information on Windows Phone EOS dates and Q&A, you can visit Microsoft’s official page that addresses everything.
