Microsoft has announced that it will retire the Together Mode feature in Microsoft Teams starting June 30. The move comes as the company begins to shift its focus toward a simpler and more unified meeting experience built around the Gallery view. The company shared the update through a Microsoft 365 Insider blog post, stating that the change helps ‘simplify the meeting experience’, ‘reduce complexity behind the scenes’, and ‘focus engineering investments on improvements that benefit every Teams meeting such as video quality, stability, and performance’.
What’s Changing
As this update rolls out, the Together mode toggle will be removed from the meeting View menu. Scenes and custom scenes, including seat assignments, will be retired along with Together mode. Organizations that used scenes for brand presence can instead use organization-provided branded backgrounds, including frosted glass options. Meanwhile, the modern Gallery will automatically scale the number and size of participant video tiles based on device capability, helping sustain smooth frame rates and consistent meeting quality across a wide range of environments.
Expected Benefits
- Fewer clicks, less hunting: A single Gallery view that “just works,” with built-in tools like pin and spotlight to keep presenters and key participants visible.
- Smoother video on modest devices: Adaptive video tile counts help prevent machine overload and reduce choppiness.
- Faster innovation: Consolidating on one layout pipeline helps deliver quality improvements more quickly to all Teams users.
Why Microsoft is Making This Change
As explained by the company in the insider blog, over time, Microsoft Teams has added several meeting layout options including Gallery, Large Gallery, Together mode, and dynamic views. While choice can be helpful, having too many layout options can also increase cognitive load for users, fragment the meeting experience across desktop, web, mobile, and Teams Rooms, and add implementation complexity across platforms. By consolidating on a single, adaptable Gallery experience, Microsoft aims to simplify the meeting interface and deliver a more consistent experience across devices, deliver higher and more stable video quality across meetings by focusing on client-optimized rendering, and free up service capacity that can be reinvested into foundational video improvements such as super-resolution, denoising, and improved color accuracy.
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