Amazon To Shut Down Chime Communications Platform in 2026 (amazon.com) 16
Amazon will discontinue its workplace communications platform Chime in February 2026 and has stopped accepting new customers, the company's cloud division AWS said in a blog post. The service, which Amazon employees widely used for video calls, messaging and business communications, is among several products being phased out. The company also recently shuttered Inspire, its TikTok-style video feed feature in its mobile app, and announced plans to shut down its Android app store earlier today.
i guess we are heading for a life-optional future (Score:2)
Microsoft Teams (Score:3, Funny)
Easy solution, just switch to Microsoft Teams!
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That is, in fact, what my company is doing. It sucks, because rather than a fairly straightforward and lightweight chat + conferencing system, we're ending up with Teams, which wants to be everything for everyone, and is deeply coupled to the OS.
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Worse. It is disorganized, confusing, clunky, and unreliable.
My rate of not being able to get into meetings I am invited to or I run and others try to get into is somewhere between 10 and 20% - and by that I mean the app not announcing people that are waiting. Links are not always working.
The worse I have encountered was that the three of us clicked the same link and were in parallel meetings, wondering where the others were. Even stepping back out and in did not work. Basically, at this point Teams confere
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Teams is a web-based app so it's not integrated to the OS at all. Runs fully in a web browser (Windows, Linux, MacOS etc) just as it does when "installed" on Windows. Even uses browser notifications (that you can allow or deny in your browser). I agree it is a bit quirky to get used to but for our company and our clients it's worked fine with end-user training.
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Microsoft Teams isn't "deeply coupled to the OS" at all. It's a desktop web application using the Edge WebView2 framework.
This is similar to the Electron framework used by Slack, Skype, and countless other applications.
There's no OS coupling in Teams.
The cloud is a trap (Score:2)
Run away!
They saved lots of money not using another service (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon was saving lots of money not using an external service since they aquired Biba Systems, original developers of Amazon Chime.
It's interesting to know how much money they could have kept saving keeping Chime alive internally instead of paying to use Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, etc.
For online chat they use Slack, but Slack Huddles are far inferior to Chime meetings.
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I suppose that might be true? But when I worked for AWS, Chime was pretty universally seen as an inferior videoconferencing solution that was basically forced on employees because Amazon really, really liked to use their own code instead of anything written by competitors.
Maybe they did a lot of work on it in the last few years? But when I last used Chime, it was missing pages and pages of features the competing products like Zoom offered. I don't believe Chime supported any kind of "green/blue screen" beh
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It had feature parity for the most part the last I used it (Amazon likes to use it for AWS training sessions).
The big problem was that Chime's chat interface stinks and wastes space compared to Slack's.
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Slack huddles *are* Chime under the hood.
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Really? How do you know? I doubt SalesForce would go for that.
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It was openly discussed when we first adopted Slack. Part of the deal was that they wanted a video & audio capability, which Chime had. Note there's a difference between Chime the app and Chime SDK. Slack uses the SDK that gives the audio and video capability. Chime App wraps that into a desktop app.
One less to install (Score:3)