Announcing the retirement of yo teams

A farewell to the Microsoft Teams apps generator that kicked off the Microsoft Teams custom app development movement.

Why we are retiring yo teams?

Yo teams is a Yeoman generator that helps developers to create Microsoft Teams apps open source frameworks using TypeScript, based on a similar pattern as the widely successful SharePoint Framework stack. It was first created in 2016 by Wictor Wilén, a Microsoft MVP and Teams developer, as a way to simplify and streamline the development process for Teams apps. Since then, yo teams has grown to become one of the most popular and widely used tools for Teams app development, with over 100,000 downloads and hundreds of GitHub stars.

Yo teams was built as a true community effort, with contributions from Microsoft MVPs, to Microsoft engineers and from developers around the world who shared their feedback, ideas, code, and documentation. Yo teams also pushed Microsoft to build first party development tooling for Teams apps, such as the Teams Toolkit, which are now available for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Features initially created for yo teams has also been merged into the official tooling as part of their packaging. These official tools offer a more integrated and consistent experience for Teams app development, with features such as scaffolding, debugging, testing, deployment, and security.

As Microsoft continues to invest in these official tools, we have decided to retire the ongoing and future work of yo teams. This means that we will no longer update, maintain, or support yo teams as a generator for new apps. We believe that this decision will allow us to focus on other areas of Teams app development and innovation, and also encourage developers to adopt the official tools that Microsoft provides.

What this means for yo teams users

We want to thank all the community contributors and all the developers who have used yo teams throughout the years. You have made yo teams a tremendous success and a valuable resource for the Teams and Microsoft 365 developer community. We are proud of what we have achieved together and we hope that you will continue to create amazing Teams apps using the official tools. A special thanks to the maintainers Appie, Rick, Stephan and Thomas and of course to everyone who has contributed and will forever be immortal in our hall of fame.

We also want to clarify that this decision does not affect the solutions that you have built using yo teams. Yo teams will remain as a generator on npm and GitHub, and you can still use it to create and update your Teams apps. However, you will not receive any new features, bug fixes, or security updates from us.

If you have any questions or concerns about this announcement, please feel free to reach out to us on GitHub or Twitter. We appreciate your understanding and support as we make this transition.

Thank you all for your partnership on this widely successful open-source project 🧡