Windows 10 Mobile Tip: Disable Skype Integration

In a nice nod to the platform’s past, Windows 10 Mobile enables Skype integration across key Windows 10 Mobile apps like Phone and Messaging. But if you find this integration irritating—as I do—you can simply disable it and use the dedicated Skype app instead.

Windows 10 Mobile, like Windows 10 for PCs, includes three apps that tie into the Skype ecosystem. They are:

Messaging. The Messaging app is used to sent instant messages (IMs) with people in your contacts list. It can use traditional SMS/MMS messaging or Skype.

Phone. The Phone app can be used to place traditional phone calls, but it can also acts as a front-end for Skype audio calls.

Skype Video. Skype Video lets you engage in audio and video calls with your contacts, using Skype.

The first two of those apps, Messaging and Phone, are hybrid apps in the sense that they can work over both traditional cell networks and technologies, or with Skype. In fact, you can transition between the two midstream, which is a key bit of functionality. As you may recall, the Messaging app in the initial version of Windows Phone 7 OS supported this kind of functionality, but between text messages and Windows Live Messenger.

Integration aside, you can of course get all this functionality via the dedicated Skype app, which works as it does on other platforms, as a standalone solution with its own user interface and notifications. I prefer to access Skype that way, for a variety of reasons. But the big one is that Skype—as a network or service—is basically broken today. Notifications are delivered inconsistently or not at all to certain devices, messages you’ve dealt with elsewhere still pop up as new conversations, and so on. I’d rather just turn this mess off.

(Also, the tile for the Messaging app routinely tells me I have 99+ unread messages, which is a Skype bug.)

Here’s how you disable this terrible integration.

Find the Skype Video app (chances are you didn’t even know it was on your phone), tap More (“…”) in the menu bar at the bottom, and then choose Settings.

Under Account, tap “Sign out” and then choose “Sign out” in the pop-up that appears.

Now, you will no longer be able to send or receive Skype messages and calls using these three apps. So go grab the Skype app from the Store (if you don’t have it already) and use that instead (if you need Skype, that is).