Goodbye, Old-School Yahoo Messenger App

If you're still using Yahoo's ancient Messenger application—you know, the one you can't even download from Yahoo anymore, but might still be clinging to because you have a fondness for purple user interfaces—then you might want to start finding some alternatives. (You could also just switch up to Yahoo's newest version of Messenger, available as a web app, a smartphone app, or as part of Yahoo Mail's for desktop application.)

According to a new announcement from Yahoo, the company is officially killing off the old version of Messenger for good. You might be able to find it to download from some software archive website, but you won't be able to use it to chat with your friends.

"In December of 2015, we announced a brand new Yahoo Messenger for mobile, the Web and in Yahoo Mail on the desktop, built on a new modern platform. This complete revamp brings users an incredibly fast, beautiful and smart way to send – and unsend – messages, photos and animated GIFs in 1:1 and group conversations. While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users," the announcement reads.

While you can't currently download the new iteration of Yahoo Messenger to your computer as a standalone Windows or Mac app, Yahoo claims it is working on a version. It hasn't published a timeline for the release in its official Yahoo Messenger FAQ, but you can sign up for updates to the in-progress program.

Yahoo is also switching up how it archives previous conversations. Any conversation histories you currently have (from using Messenger) are archived in Yahoo Mail, but they'll be going away on August 5 as well. You'll be able to export them to your desktop or laptop if you really need to save whatever it is you have typed to your friends. Going forward, Yahoo Messenger will keep track of your conversations in their respective chat windows.

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Yahoo also noted, in a separate part of its announcement, that it will be dropping the Yahoo Recommends service on September 1—a little widget for providing (Yahoo-powered) links to other related content on one's website, mixed with occasional bits of advertising.